Senior .NET software developer, Umbraco Certified Master and Umbraco MVP specialising in Azure based in Bristol, UK
With a positive attitude, communicating well with customers and colleagues, Joe is an experienced full stack .NET developer with extensive knowledge of Umbraco CMS and the Azure platform. He is enthused by building accessible, quality solutions and pushing the boundaries of what a project can achieve.
Having built and architected Umbraco and cloud solutions over the past decade, working within digital agencies and software consultancies for the hospitality, data, finance, start-up, charity and public sectors, his experience is varied. With a particular interest in accessibility and open source, regularly speaking on both subjects, Joe has been rewarded with an Umbraco MVP award since 2021.
Joe's currently part of the team of friendly, award-winning experts working with our clients to create flawless Umbraco and Azure solutions at Bump.
Bump works with clients in various sectors, primarily including e-commerce and hospitality.
Joe's role also involves conference talks and other software community activities.
Joe worked at Bristol Pride as the Assistant Volunteer Manager, helping coordinate volunteers across the main event site. Championing and directing people in their free time can be more challenging than leading paid staff, requiring a deeper level of understanding and higher levels of motivation. In this way, volunteer management is not dissimilar to maintaining and building open source communities.
Joe worked with the development team at Radley Yeldar to support and improve Umbraco websites for a range of clients.
Working with a team at Altius, Joe has been lead web developer delivering the web portal in a data platform project with a tight deadline. The project was an Umbraco CMS based solution with advanced JavaScript and numerous API integrations. The role involved working closely with the rest of the team at Altius, leading a small team of developers, collaborating with the third-party design team and liaising with the client.
The role was largely remote even before the COVID-19 lockdown and Joe made good use of remote-working tools to keep in touch with other team members and provide up to date progress reports.
At Etch, Joe has experienced life in a fast-paced digital agency handling numerous ongoing projects of varying sizes.
He has operated as lead developer on expansive agile projects for large financial clients; worked as a part of a team; and individually on a range of clients particularly in the hospitality, marine, eCommerce and finance sectors with equal emphasis on green-field and maintenance work as well as systems architecture.
Joe’s time at Etch has increased his exposure to Umbraco, .NET and Azure and introduced extensive knowledge of .NET Core, micro-services.
He has experience of managing development teams, assisting junior developers and managing an intern.
In 2017, Joe took a six-month sabbatical to engage in a role in outdoor education. Over the period, Joe ran numerous 1-5 day camps teaching bushcraft skills to junior and secondary school students, while also managing a team of 3-6 staff. Joe taught sessions on various topics including leave-no-trace, plant identification, water contamination, and lifecycles of and risks to aquatic and land-based species. The role also involved overseeing the general running of the camp and supporting both staff and pupils present including understanding provided risk assessments, running dynamic risk assessments, first aid and general welfare.
The role at a consultancy allowed Joe to spend more time working on a wider range of products and with newer technologies. He began to have more responsibility when it comes to project management as well as communicating with existing and prospective clients by email, phone and in person in meetings and presentation environments.
Working at Profound, as well as working with ASP.NET MVC, Joe had the chance to work with many technologies including: numerous Microsoft Azure services; CMS packages Umbraco, Sitecore and Kentico; Adobe PhoneGap/Apache Cordova; and new HTML5 and CSS3 features. He was also given the challenge of reforming front end development within the company, looking at developing their CSS and Sass/SCSS methodology and bringing in some JavaScript guidelines.
Late in 2015 he was given the opportunity to mentor of a newly employed graduate developer which has given him the rewarding opportunity to teach C# and JavaScript.
Profound worked primarily within the eCommerce and financial markets.
While at Furlong, Joe was exposed to in-house development and continuous improvement of the systems developed by the company within the education and data management sectors. The systems used included Windows Forms desktop applications as well as ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications with a lot of exposure to complex T-SQL queries and Microsoft SQL database management.
The Community Advisory Board was formed in August 2024 with the aim of helping figure out how best to interact and communicate together in the virtual space: both for existing community members, and for people just discovering Umbraco.
Joe is passionate about open web technologies, discoverability of content and fighting link rot. All of which he believes will prove important for the future of the Community site and replacement for Our. Joe sees great value in technology communities - the Umbraco Community in particular! - and he continues to do his bit to help the Umbraco Community flourish.
Being on the organising team for a local software development community has allowed Joe to help maintain and grow the Umbraco software community in Bristol. The role involved booking voluntary speakers for events, engaging with companies to encourage hosting or sponsorship of events, promoting events across various platforms and hosting events including introductory presentations.
The Core Collaborators encourage and manage the community's pull-requests to the CMS. The team is passionate about assisting and supporting contributors.
The Open Canoe Association (OCA) is a national membership and sports club for open canoeists in the UK. The association is entirely run by volunteers. The role of Volunteer Coordinator is new to the OCA and Joe is the first to hold the post. Responsibilities include building and maintaining a database of volunteer's skills and experience, acting as a main contact for all volunteers, engaging and supporting volunteers, both current and prospective.
Stewarding at music festivals involves engaging with festival customers, artists and other teams such as security and the festival organisers to help ensure the smooth-running of an event. Supervising other stewards also adds team management and volunteer engagement to the list of roles, ensuring other volunteers have the support, personal protective equipment and breaks they need.
Joe has been teaching paddlesport since he gained his coaching qualification at the age of 16. Getting adults and children of all ages into paddlesport and the benefits of access to “blue spaces” has been a keen interest of his ever since. As well as teaching technical paddling skills Joe also covered topics such as personal protective equipment, licensing and river access and consideration of other river users. Joe has run sessions and trips on numerous waterways, and is always keen to highlight the environmental issues affecting our waterways including mitigating the risks posed by paddlers.
Running trips involves pre-planning logistics as well as ensuring the safety of a group of paddlers: understanding and contributing to written risk assessments, running dynamic risk assessments, and performing first aid if necessary.
As a surf mentor at The Wave Project, the surf therapy charity, Joe works one-to-one with a diverse selection of children and young people, providing a space to make friends and improve social skills while helping build their confidence and self-esteem through supporting them learning to surf. The experience continues to improve Joe’s communication skills with the young people.
Testimonials can be found below, while references are available upon request.
We’re thrilled to renew your MVP status and continue recognizing the thoughtful, consistent work you do across the Umbraco community. Your commitment to collaboration really shines, whether it’s through organizing umBristol meetups, contributing to key events like Umbraco Spark and the UK Festival, or helping guide the new forum transition through the Community Advisory Board. We’ve also been especially impressed by how you use your blog, talks, and open discussions to share practical insights and spark broader conversations, always with a focus on inclusivity and accessibility. Your work truly helps strengthen and connect the community, and we’re excited to see what’s next!
I had the pleasure of employing Joe not long after he completed his apprenticeship. He immediately sought out tough challenges, leveraged the benefits of the Azure platform early, focusing on both the micro-level detail and stepping back to explore the bigger picture / what the system or customer using the system is trying to achieve.
It's fair to say Joe is a tenacious developer. He demonstrates technical intensity, along with a challenger approach to push for the best technical solutions possible, all whilst being personable, amiable, and open to different ideas.
Joe's work spanned Azure SQL Database, ASP.NET web applications, through to a real passion for structured, framework based front-end development and the PaaS infrastructure design behind them all, earning him, in my opinion, a very genuine "Full Stack" moniker.
Joe is an experienced full stack .NET developer with an extensive knowledge of Umbraco CMS, which was used as part of the project we worked on together. He implemented complex integrations with other Azure components and was able to deliver a robust solution both in terms of performance, usability and accessibility. While mostly focused on the Umbraco implementation, he was able to pick up additional responsibilities when required such as leading less senior developers in his area of expertise and learn new technologies required by the overall solution. He worked closely with the business and the designers, proposing solutions and quickly adapting to continuously changing UI/UX specifications.
In addition to the above, Joe's positive personality makes him a great colleague and one of the key members of any team that requires his technical skills.
I worked as a Product Manager with Joe, in delivering a statistics website for a large government department. Joe was the lead front-end developer, shaping the solution, delivering it under tight deadlines, and working closely with the client. The public-facing website has now been live for 3 months, with little to no issues, hundreds of thousands of visits per month, and a delighted client. This outcome is testament to the high quality work Joe delivered.
As a product manager & scrum master, working with Joe is incredibly easy. Joe is able to convert high-level, often unclear, requirements into a well-defined user story, including clear technical steps and realistic estimates. Joe is then highly effective at delivering on requirements, producing high-quality outputs in record time. A recurrent ‘problem’ for me was keeping Joe busy, as he would get through his workload very fast.
Joe has extensive knowledge of government digital services standards, including accessibility and usability. This was key in our public sector project, and Joe was central in shaping our product to produce an accessible website, in line with GDS standards.
Joe works well with the client, advising on technical options in a confident, professional, yet friendly communication style. The client often specifically asked to speak with him, knowing he would provide the best approach to solve an issue. Joe also led a small team of developers effectively, setting the technical direction and pace for the team. As a team-member, Joe is positive, easy to work with, and has an infectiously good mood. It has a been a pleasure to work with him, and I hope I will again!
I worked with Joe over a number of years and found him to be an excellent developer. He has the ability to take a brief, a comment or a simple sketched drawing and extrapolate that out into a working product or feature, which is my view is a great talent to have. You can't always have a full tech spec available to build from.
He's also great with clients, and on numerous occasions I've fronted him up in all sorts of situations, some nice, some tricky, and he's always coped extremely well with these pressures.
I really can't fault his dedication, skill and willingness to push the boundaries of what we want to achieve. He's also a kind, friendly and happy person to work with, which goes a long way in this world.
I would certainly recommend him to others.