Career Timeline

Creative technology sandbox

Personal project

Documentary-based narrative games, zero-shot voice cloning, marker-based AR, and an audio-analysis drum trainer — a deliberate practice space for unfamiliar stacks.

Dynamic page embed for Weebly customization

Little Red Coffee

An embeddable catering page that renders inside the main site's iframe and broadcasts its own height, with a redirect guard when loaded directly.

Niagara Queer Archive

Niagara Queer Archive

A community archive of 2SLGBTQIA+ history in Niagara, where consent is enforced in the data model — a record cannot be published until consent is granted.

Private Calendar Booking System

The Variables Co.

Self-hosted discovery-call booking on shared PHP hosting — Google Calendar as the source of truth, service-account JWT auth, no database and no Composer.

Private Newsletter Campaign Platform

Little Red Coffee

Replaced Mailchimp with a self-hosted send pipeline: FastAPI, SQLite, React 19, switchable email providers, open and click tracking, and campaign analytics.

Published React Component Library

The Variables Co.

A React + TypeScript component library published to GitHub Packages as @llakewood/varco-frontend and installed across six production frontends.

Restaurant In-Store Display

Little Red Coffee

Live menu board driven straight from the Square catalogue — no manual sign updates when prices or items change.

Restaurant Reservation System

Little Red Coffee

Single-file table reservation app embedded into a Weebly site — no build step, no framework, no server of its own.

Restaurant Service Operations Platform

Little Red Coffee

A hub-and-spoke operations platform for a working coffee shop: eight services behind one dashboard, covering finance, catering, media planning, inventory and live POS.

Sales Channel Consultation

Private client — via The Variables Co.

A screenprinting side business asked whether Shopify was the right call. I gave the honest answer, plus a roll-your-own alternative with real costs on both.

Vibe Coding — AI development workshop

The Variables Co.

A four-session workshop teaching non-developers to build real things with AI coding tools, with teacher notes, handouts and a working demo app.

EventFusion

EventFusion — via The Variables Co.

Static site build for an event design and decor company — hand-built HTML and CSS across a full multi-section site.

WordPress fleet security and performance audit

GOCACTUS Design Inc. (hosted property portfolio) — via The Variables Co.

An audit across several long-standing, high-traffic WordPress properties found vulnerabilities in every one. Thirty days after remediation: bot support requests gone, spam signups from 200/day to zero, performance up 53%.

JHSO — staff learning hub

John Howard Society of Ontario (JHSO) — via The Variables Co.

A WordPress-based training platform for John Howard Society staff, with bulk user provisioning and a customized onboarding email flow that had to survive WordPress core's translation rigidity.

Langford Canoe

Langford Canoe — via The Variables Co.

Custom WordPress theme and hosting for one of Canada's oldest canoe builders.

MS Risk — site rebuild and WP Engine migration

MS Risk — via The Variables Co.

A second-generation rebuild for a global risk management consultancy, moving from a legacy custom theme to a block-based build deployed to WP Engine through CI.

Recycle BC

Recycle BC — via The Variables Co.

WordPress platform work for British Columbia's residential packaging and paper recycling program.

The Variables Co. Website

The Variables Co.

Static website for digital consultancy featuring editorial-inspired design, scroll animations, and Web3Forms integration.

VMDMA

VMDMA — via The Variables Co.

WordPress site development and maintenance on an Avada child theme.

Little Red Coffee - Digital Platform

Little Red Coffee

Comprehensive digital launch for artisan coffee shop startup, including brand identity, e-commerce platform, POS integration, and marketing campaign on startup budget.

Circular Materials - Security Rescue

Circular Materials

Emergency response to compromised website under bot attack. Conducted security audit, hardened infrastructure, implemented CloudFlare premium protection, mitigating 17,000 daily malicious requests.

OGC geospatial route planning application

Provincial government — via EY (Ernst & Young) — EY Design Studio

An OGC-compliant web mapping application for a provincial government, built as a code-challenge showcase: route planning and saving, layer switching, containerized, in a TypeScript monorepo.

Due diligence audit — $2M security software acquisition

Enterprise client — via EY (Ernst & Young) — EY Design Studio

A client had already bought a $2M security platform, then lost the only developer who understood it — and nothing was documented. The team reverse-engineered the system under emergency conditions and reported what was actually there.

Ingredient Sync

Personal project

Headless CMS platform built with Strapi for ingredient and recipe data synchronization, featuring modern JavaScript stack with React and Redux.

Advanced WordPress build — lead generation and e-commerce

Enterprise client — via EY (Ernst & Young) — EY Design Studio

Advanced WordPress build with lead generation, geolocation, e-commerce and data migration — delivered to WCAG 2.1 AA.

Conversational chatbot interfaces — MS Bot Framework

Enterprise clients — via EY (Ernst & Young) — EY Design Studio

Conversational dialogue flows and chat interfaces built on Microsoft Bot Framework for enterprise client engagements.

EY Infinity — DevSecOps delivery platform

EY internal / enterprise clients — via EY (Ernst & Young) — EY Design Studio

EY's DevSecOps offering for enterprise clients — proven approaches, tooling and accelerators for transforming how IT services get delivered.

EY PFM Blockchain — public finance accountability

EY internal product — via EY (Ernst & Young) — EY Design Studio

A public finance management tool on Ethereum smart contracts, where I ran the WCAG 2.1 AA audit of the component library and put automated accessibility testing into the pipeline.

JHSO — Prison Visitation Guide

John Howard Society of Ontario (JHSO)

Transformed static PDF prison visitation guide into searchable, accessible web application with custom WordPress CMS, improving information access for families and service providers.

National expansion roadmap — youth justice program

Nonprofit — community youth program — via EY (Ernst & Young) — EY Design Studio

Product management and capability roadmap for the national expansion of a community program for children at risk of contact with the criminal justice system.

National government — citizen-facing web application

National government — via EY (Ernst & Young) — EY Design Studio

React/Next.js application for a national government, built against the client's existing design system on a Tailwind boilerplate, through requirements, deployment and UAT.

The Variables Co. — Svelte portfolio application

The Variables Co.

An earlier incarnation of the company site built in Svelte with a headless CMS, and written with documentation treated as a first-class part of the project.

EY Design Studio — SDLC, security and coding standards

EY Design Studio — via EY (Ernst & Young) — EY Design Studio

Authored the studio's software development lifecycle, security practice and coding standards documentation — the reference the delivery teams worked from.

UI system and component library architecture

Enterprise client — via EY (Ernst & Young) — EY Design Studio

A UX/UI engagement that turned into a skills-gap analysis and a reusable component library architecture for the client's whole product suite.

War Child Canada — __Make fundraising campaign

War Child Canada — via Filament Creative Inc.

An innovative fundraising campaign built on the Unsplash photography API and Facebook Charity pages — scoped, built and shipped inside a 24-hour hackathon.

WCAG 2.1 AA audit and remediation practice

Enterprise clients — via EY (Ernst & Young) — EY Design Studio

Built and ran the accessibility audit and remediation practice for enterprise clients — findings translated into prioritized guidance creative and dev teams could actually act on.

Website recovery after an eroded vendor relationship

Enterprise client — via EY (Ernst & Young) — EY Design Studio

A CMS built out by a vendor closely tied to the open-source platform itself, a client relationship that had broken down, and exactly one contractually obligated screenshare to learn the system before taking over edits and deployments.

GOCACTUS Design Inc. - Agency Support Partnership

GOCACTUS Design Inc.

Ongoing partnership managing a dozen legacy WordPress websites during agency transition. Maintenance, hosting optimization (~50% cost reduction), development estimates, and direct client communication.

The Variables Co. — WordPress era

The Variables Co.

The company site's WordPress generation, hosted on Pantheon with their upstream workflow.

eHealth Ontario — CMS end-of-life migration

eHealth Ontario — via Filament Creative Inc.

A commercially licensed CMS at end of life, with the licence clock running and the system already hitting its limits. Mapped the migration, chose the replacement, and taught the team Git on the way out.

Filament Creative — DevOps and hosting modernization

Filament Creative Inc. (internal)

Migrated the agency's hosting and development workflow to managed services, closing a skills gap and saving an estimated $25K a year.

Proprietary application recovery after a CTO departure

Private client — via Filament Creative Inc.

Hundreds of thousands already invested, a build system nobody could explain, and exactly one phone call with the developer who wrote it. Took the application over, then shipped and published new features on AWS.

CTV 'This Is Us' — YouTube homepage takeover

CTV / Bell Media — via GOCACTUS Design Inc.

A rich media banner that ran as a 24-hour YouTube homepage takeover — new platform, new tooling, ten days, delivered on time and under budget.

Livingston International — 500+ page responsive overhaul

Livingston International — via GOCACTUS Design Inc.

Responsive rebuild of a 500+ page bilingual WordPress site, with a custom content management layer built on custom post types and a unified brand portal across all their properties.

BeOurGuestEvents.ca

Be Our Guest Events

WordPress-based event website using Twenty Sixteen theme.

GOCACTUS Design — team build and delivery practice

GOCACTUS Design Inc. (internal)

Built a development team of three, established the workflow and build automation standards behind it, and pitched at the final stage of a large government RFP.

Moonfleet Astrology

Moonfleet Astrology — via The Variables Co.

WordPress site for an astrology practice.

JHSO — custom WordPress platform

John Howard Society of Ontario (JHSO) — via The Variables Co.

The main JHSO web platform on a long-lived custom theme, with documented core customizations and a legacy PHP stack now being planned off.

Media Factory — platform and SDK overhaul

Newzulu / Filemobile (platform) — via Newzulu Platform (formerly Filemobile)

An enterprise media asset management tool built on Prototype and Flash in 2008, actively breaking in modern browsers by 2014. My team rebuilt the development model — and in doing so, focused the business model.

The User-Generated Content Blueprint

Newzulu / Filemobile — via Newzulu Platform (formerly Filemobile)

A free ebook on user-generated content marketing — what you need to know to hit your content marketing goals.

CBC Canada Reads HyperLocal

CBC / Radio-Canada — via Newzulu Platform (formerly Filemobile)

A five-week national call-out asking Canadians what's changing in their neighbourhood — and the first fully responsive community app I built on Bootstrap, turned around at breathtaking speed.

CoderDojo Toronto — youth mentorship

CoderDojo Foundation

Founded and ran the Toronto CoderDojo chapter for nine years — free monthly coding meetups for kids, 100+ events, built on volunteers and donated venues.

CTV MyNews — citizen journalism platform

CTV / Bell Media — via Newzulu Platform (formerly Filemobile)

The most ambitious build of Filemobile's citizen journalism solution: geographically targeted breaking-news assignments with game mechanics to keep contributors engaged.

Sports Day In Canada

CBC Sports / ParticipACTION — via Newzulu Platform (formerly Filemobile)

National participation campaign delivered on the Filemobile community platform.

Stewardship Ontario and CSSA property family

Stewardship Ontario / CSSA / Automotive Materials Stewardship — via The Variables Co.

A family of related producer-responsibility and recycling organization sites sharing a common theme codebase — Stewardship Ontario, Automotive Materials Stewardship, and the CSSA platform behind them.

Artist Portfolio & Custom Theme

Stanley Maitland — via The Variables Co.

WordPress site built and themed for a working artist.

Artist Portfolio Site

Laura Moore — via The Variables Co.

Artist portfolio site on WordPress with an actively maintained media library.

Canadian Geographic Photo Club

Canadian Geographic — via Newzulu Platform (formerly Filemobile)

A three-part build: a large photography member community, a contest microsite, and a Facebook-formatted version of the same contest.

DBLDNM.com

Personal project

WordPress website featuring Jetpack integration and custom Imbalance2 theme.

Media Factory — geographic notification centre

Newzulu / Filemobile (platform) — via Newzulu Platform (formerly Filemobile)

A map interface for selecting content by centre point and radius — draggable marker, draggable radius — and the vehicle for converting the codebase from Prototype to jQuery.

President's Choice BBQTown

President's Choice / Loblaw — via Newzulu Platform (formerly Filemobile)

A project management blunder, honestly — an agency middleman, endless revisions, and Google Maps geocoding that would not do what the spec required. Everyone ended up happy anyway.

FoxNews uReport

Fox News — via Newzulu Platform (formerly Filemobile)

The best client experience I've ever had — wireframes, user flow, design and cross-browser tested markup, all delivered by the client. It set my standard for what clients can bring to the table.

Long-Running Personal Blog (2011–2015)

Personal WordPress blog with extensive theme collection and multi-year content archive spanning 2011-2015.

Newzulu / Filemobile — front-end team lead

Newzulu / Filemobile (platform) — via Newzulu Platform (formerly Filemobile)

Led the front-end team on a SaaS user-generated content platform through four years, a full technical overhaul, and the shift from Prototype and Flash to a modern toolchain.

Personal Brand Site

The Variables Co.

Main site companion to the client's long-running personal blog.

TheMorals.ca

The Morals — via The Variables Co.

Band site and blog on WordPress, running through several theme generations as the project evolved.

University of Toronto — Project Blue II

University of Toronto — via Newzulu Platform (formerly Filemobile)

Community platform engagement for the University of Toronto on the Filemobile platform.

CanadaIndie.com

Personal project

Music blog platform covering Canadian independent music scene with content aggregation, social media integration, and SEO optimization.

IndieTo

Personal project

A publication from the Toronto independent music years.

Canoe.ca — portal properties and election microsites

Canoe.ca / Quebecor — via Sun Media

Microsites for Elections Canada, Elections Ontario and Elections Alberta, branded partnership sites, and a pivotal role in a massive rebrand of the portal properties.

Sun Media — music and culture blog network

Toronto Sun / Sun Media network — via Sun Media

Built and maintained the active music and culture blogs across the Toronto Sun and national Sun network, and started an office waste reduction program on the side.

TorontoIndie.com — UGC community

Personal project

The site that brought me to the big city. The owner of the El Mocambo moved me into the basement, rent free, to build a Toronto clone of LondonIndie.

Honeycomb Worldwide — membership, survey and CRM products

Honeycomb Worldwide (internal and client) — via Honeycomb Worldwide Inc.

Built online products — membership sites, survey tools and CRM software — and hired, trained and managed the small web team that ran them.

Internet Advertising Corp. — first web job

Internet Advertising Corp.

Photoshop 4, slice-and-export HTML, and Flash animation. Dozens of sites for London, Ontario businesses. Accessibility was not a word anyone used yet.

LondonIndie.com — first-generation UGC community

Personal project

Custom CMS and community platform for the London, Ontario music scene — artist profiles, mp3 uploads, and a shared events calendar, built before the tools for any of that existed.

The Variables Co. — early iterations

The Variables Co.

The first sixteen years of the company's own web presence, rebuilt many times over as the tooling of the day changed.