---
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title: "BSkyB: Senior UI Developer"
meta: "Almost three years of full-time employment as Senior UI Developer at Sky"
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lux: "Case Study"
---

For almost three years, I was employed by
[BSkyB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSkyB) (Sky) as Senior UI Developer. I
worked primarily in their Betting & Gaming arm; a suite of highly trafficked and
very highly profitable online products.

As you can imagine, over three years of employment, my responsibilities were
incredibly varied: development work, design and design process rationalisation,
internal workshops, performance engineering, and more.

One of my first tasks when I joined Sky was to rebuild the front-end of
[Sky Bet](https://www.skybet.com/), for which I was the sole front-end developer.
From there on in, I steered the majority of decisions regarding how we should go
about building our UIs. This took the form of

* building internal frameworks and UI Toolkits for other developers to implement;
* providing a design–development bridge, and handling des–dev relations;
* running internal workshops with design and engineering teams;
* becoming product-agnostic, and moving from scrum to scrum to help out
  whichever teams needed me;
* pairing and reviewing code written by other developers;
* evangelising architectural and performance best practices within the company;
* generally improving the techniques and approaches Sky took to writing UIs at
  scale.

<figure>
  <img src="{{ site.cloudinary }}/img/content/case-studies/bskyb/skybet.com.jpg" alt="">
  <figcaption>Screenshot of the Sky Bet homepage. <a href="/img/content/case-studies/bskyb/skybet.com-full.jpg">View full size/quality (672KB).</a></figcaption>
</figure>

## Aluminium

After Sky Bet was launched, and my time was getting increasingly stretched
between products, I—with input from members of the design team—began work on
<cite>Aluminium</cite>, a UI Toolkit built on top of
[inuitcss](http://inuitcss.com). <cite>Aluminium</cite>’s aim was to allow other
developers (particularly non-front-end savvy Software Engineers) to build UIs
out of a library of consistent, on-brand components. While
<cite>Aluminium</cite> was being used by other engineers to build other
products, my time was freed me up to work on one of the most exciting and
ambitious projects I have ever been a part of: [Mobile Sky
Bet](https://m.skybet.com/).

## Mobile

Sky Bet was hit by an unusually early uptake in mobile users; far earlier and
more dramatically than a lot of other industries and sectors were reporting at
the time. Having only just finished work on the classic, non-responsive
‘desktop’ build, it was decided that we respond very quickly and build a
specific m-dot site as our mobile offering. Once again, I was the solo front-end
developer on this project, and it was around this time we also employed a
dedicated Performance Engineer, who I worked very closely with to
ensure our UIs were just as speedy as his software and platform code.

<blockquote class="pull-quote  pull-quote--context">
    <p>Harry was always acutely aware of the performance implications of what we
       did and was always sure to improve the speed of the things we were
       working on. He’s great at rationalising and pushing back on design
       requirements that could adversely effect performance and working out
       better and faster ways of achieving the same result.</p>
    <b class="pull-quote__source"><a href="https://trilemma.technology/">Dan Rathbone</a>,
       Lead Performance Engineer, BSkyB</b>
</blockquote>

The results were fantastic, and Mobile Sky Bet was one of the best, most
successful perf projects I’ve ever been a part of. You can actually watch a
small dissection of that process in my CSSconf.eu talk, [<cite>Normalising
Designs for Better Quality
CSS</cite>](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldx4ZFxMEeo&hd=1).

After my tenure at Sky, during which I’d worked on instilling a performance-led
approach to design; better CSS architectures for their products, and a
rationalised design process, I decided that I wanted to go it alone and do the
same kinds of things for clients all over the world.

In total, I had a direct impact on all of Sky Betting & Gaming’s digital
products, be that through direct development and engineering work, through
frameworks and tools I’d written, to code reviews and workshops with other team
members. Working at Sky was an incredible experience, and I’d recommend it to
anyone.

---

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