This goes in chronological order by the way, so if you want to know what I’ve been up to most recently, scroll to the last few paragraphs.
I graduated from Imperial College University in 2014 having read Physics. I made the proactive decision to leave a year earlier than most of my peers. I was ready to not be a student.
In my time at Imperial I formed an integral part of the multiple teams that delivered some of the largest intellectual conferences in London, TEDxImperialCollege (2012 & 2014), TEDMEDLiveImperialCollege (2013) & TEDxAlbertopolis (2013), developing skills first fostered whilst organising music festivals and art exhibitions from 2009-2011 under Lost&Found the MK Gallery’s youth project. We kept minutes in comic strip form before it was cool. In 2013 I was awarded a frontline scholarship by TEDMED in recognition of playing my leading role as committee chair, delivering the first TEDMEDLive event outside of the United States and flew to Washington to attend TEDMED 2013.
I spent much of my time at university wishing I’d chosen Computer Science. This motivated me to learn beyond the very scientific applications of C/C++ and MATLAB/Octave I was required to learn. This motivation manifests itself today as the ability to build modern web apps with the most cutting edge tools (HTML5/CSS3/SASS/Angular/Polymer/Web Components/Node.js/D3.js) as well as a host of handy peripheral skills that enrich any development environment such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Machine Learning and Nespresso Coffee Machines.
One such project was Ferret, a powerful tool for finding first-person, eye-witness accounts of major events through Twitter. It was a very limited proof-of-concept. The idea was sparked at a hackathon run by the Times, Sunday Times and the Sun and won by myself and four friends. We then spent a further two weeks developing Ferret within the Times development team.
These skills lead me to Decoded, a company I spent the summers of 2012 and 2013 at working to improve the content of their training courses and teaching their illustrious clients. I was even roped in to make a data visualisation with D3.js for them which I talk about here.
Straight outta uni I began working at Head London as a Junior Product Developer in their Labs division. I experimented with new technologies building working prototypes. I worked with UI designers, UX architects and client service professionals to create compelling proof of concept apps, web apps and physical prototypes presented to clients such as Coca Cola Enterprises, McDonalds and Unibet. It’s here I also learned agile development principles through professional training and consistent application. You can read about RoboLola, just one example of a typical Head Labs project I was involved with, here.
After a year at Head, I joined fluently. Fluently (now wound up) was online market place startup offering high quality human translation services that my friend Giovanni had co-founded at the start of 2015. At fluently my responsibilities included UX/UI design, front end development, UA testing, API maintenance and agile project management. We took a future proof approach to building the all Angular.js 1.x front end (directive first, controller free). I strengthened my full stack Javascript skills building in Node.js and MongoDB on the backend. You can read more about what I produced while working there here.
Today I’m a product manager at Cytora. I joined as a knowledge engineer, crafting datasets to train machine learning models. These classifiers detect events from news media which we sell as event alerts through a web app. This event data also powers our risk engine. The risk engine yields actionable insights for insurance companies looking to price and select risk better. I’m tasked with crafting products which give our customers the most frictionless access to the various outputs of the risk engine.
Feel free to peruse the portfolio and labs section for more links and descriptions of my various little projects.
Jeshua Maxey 
