Work we build, and run.

The problem

Local event listings are scattered across venue sites, council pages and social posts, and the sites that gather them up are often out of date. A listing that sends someone to a cancelled show costs more trust than it earns. We wanted a guide that only shows an event once it has been checked against the page it came from.

Constraints

No hand-keyed listings, because the guide covers England county by county. No data we are not allowed to republish: places come from openly licensed sources, and commercial ticketing feeds are not used without written permission. Automated reading can misread a date, so nothing is trusted without a check. And the whole service runs on a single server.

The live home page at whatsonboard.uk.

Architecture

1. Public sources
2. Read and extract
3. Automated checks
4. Publish or review

A weekly engine works through a list of public sources and reads the details of each event. Every item then goes through automated checks against the page it came from, covering dates, duplicates and whether it is a real, public, local event. Only items that pass are published; anything uncertain goes to a person for review.

What we built

Town and county guides with a map-first interface, a directory of local places, labelled advertising with online payments, a portal where businesses manage their own listings, and a simple way to ask for a listing to be removed that is honoured across the whole site. Visitor measurement respects privacy, each release is tested before it goes live, and the data is backed up off the server.

Outcome

Live at whatsonboard.uk, released in small versioned steps. The rule that matters most has held throughout: nothing automated has the last word on a date without a check.

The problem

Monitoring tools are good at raising alerts and poor at following them through. Risks are acknowledged, closed by someone who assumed a fix worked, and come back. Leaders get a dashboard of numbers rather than a plain statement of where the estate stands and what needs deciding.

Constraints

It has to run on the organisation’s own hardware, make no outbound internet calls by default and call no AI or remote model at runtime. On hardware you own, requests for your data come to you rather than to a US parent. It is being designed to observe systems read-only, for environments where nothing should touch a running system. And every decision has to be explainable later.

The Ops Map running against a synthetic 10,000-system test estate. Every organisation, person and system shown is fictional.

Architecture

1. Read-only connectors
2. Rules engine
3. Hotspot with evidence
4. Named owner
5. Fix against an authorised change
6. Cleared when the source agrees

Connectors are designed to read, never write, and every decision is kept on a tamper-evident record. A hotspot is being built to clear only once the source system no longer observes the condition.

What we built

An overview that opens on one sentence about the estate, ranked hotspots with the evidence behind them, and the Ops Map, a 3D view that goes from estate to site to individual device. The software suggests and people decide.

Outcome

Tested against synthetic estates for several sectors, with a large automated test suite run on every change. Available on request, set up and run for each organisation, with scope agreed after a consultation.

The problem

We wanted a showcase for real-time 3D that people leave running rather than glance at once: a coral reef in a glass case that is different every time you look, and that runs on an ordinary laptop or phone without an install.

Constraints

Everything renders live in the browser, so the work is a constant trade between realism and frame rate on modest hardware. A world has to start quickly on a phone, keep working offline from a single file, and never present an unfinished feature as finished.

Reefglass running in the browser.

Architecture

1. Local time, moon and tide
2. World state
3. Scene and creatures
4. Cameras
5. Web player or single file

A shared core drives light, water and life from the viewer’s local time, moon phase and season. The same source builds two ways: a web player that loads quickly, and a single self-contained file for offline use and the desktop wallpaper app.

What we built

Reefglass, modelled on a reef in the Kerama Islands, Okinawa, with a free-roaming Reef camera, an automatic Director camera and a Sightings guide to the life on the reef, laid out to stay usable on a phone. New visual features go through a blind side-by-side review before they ship, and the ones that do not pass stay switched off.

The Glass Worlds page on this site.

Outcome

Reefglass is live and free to play. The engine and the build pipeline are shared by the worlds now in development.