John Lennard

Goldie's Golden Egg Hunt is an augmented reality game developed with Niantic Labs. It uses the 8thWall toolkit to create a Pokémon GO style experience promoting Farmer Brown branded eggs, and distributes a total prize pool of $100,000 every year.

The game creates an interactive egg hunt on a 3D map, with a mixed reality view to collect the eggs once found. Players collect eggs to win prizes. The game application manages and tracks every aspect of user onboarding, egg collection, prize redemption, and usage reporting.

I was the primary developer and worked with the client to define the game process, rules, and functionality. Together with our design team, I worked to produce wireframes of the user interface and map the internal workflow. Finally, I developed the production version of the mobile game and all the required backend systems.

This was a challenging project and drew on a wide range of skills:

• Large project scoping, feasibility tests, and product documentation
• Frontend gameplay development in JavaScript, using AR frameworks
• Supporting OIDC login providers from Apple, Facebook, and Google
• Database schema design for player data and prizes
• Geospatial features for mobile device location and orientation, OpenStreetMap integration, and MySQL geospatial queries
• Infrastructure design, automated provisioning with Terraform, and ongoing management
• Design and production of performance reports, including gameplay data, prize collections, and heatmaps of geographical usage
• Monitoring and logging with Raygun and BetterStack

A joint venture between Awanui Scientific and Ecrotek NZ, My Humm provides flexible, easy-to-use testing of honey to apiarists, exporters, blenders, and packers of honey in New Zealand.

Implemented in React, My Humm is a web portal that lets honey producers place orders for lab tests, view their test results, discover blending optimisations, and create custom reports.

I was the lead developer and architect on this project, responsible for:

• Scoping and planning with the client and their project management team
• User interface implementation in React
• Data modelling and implementation
• Symfony/PHP backend service development
• Deployment of a COIN-OR/branch-and-cut optimization model using Python Azure Functions
• Infrastructure design and specification
• GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines for container builds and deployment to Azure
• Azure, Fastly CDN, and DNS management using Terraform
• Server-side PDF generation of customised lab reports

Smith and Smith hired Gravitate to add an online booking system to their web presence.

We redesigned their whole site, and built a new booking system as a deeply-integrated component. The online system grew rapidly to handle most of their business, and the project scope expanded to also include the design and management of their Microsoft Azure tenancy.

I developed the initial specification, scoping, and costing. I also set up the automated deployment pipeline, and after the site went live, I designed and built an automatic provisioning system for the Azure infrastructure.

Across the project, my work included:

• Infrastructure design and specification documents
• GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline
• Azure provisioning and management using Terraform
• Fastly CDN configuration
• Metrics and API monitoring implementation

The Fred Hollows Foundation is a charity working toward ending preventable blindness in Pacific nations. Their web site was complex, out of date, and there were security concerns with the high volume of donations they receive.

We redeveloped the web site to allow them to perform deeper, more interactive story-telling while preserving integration with their existing donation management systems. A high public profile and a lot of high-value donations meant their organisation has a very strong stance on cyber-security, and I worked with their IT team, auditors, and security providers to ensure the site met all PCI compliance requirements.

My responsibilities included:

• Annual website PCI compliance documentation and improvements
• Security review, updates, and remediation
• Donation platform integration with Raisers Edge and Online Express
• Implementation of a field-level encryption framework for storing personal data
• Server provisioning and hardening
• CDN configuration using Fastly
• SIEM platform implementation using Wazuh

The Breast Cancer Foundation NZ were struggling with the dual roles of education and fund-raising on their web site, with dense content often overwhelming simple appeals for public support. We redesigned the site to better meet their objectives, allowing them to provide clear information to people with breast cancer while still fully supporting their fundraising activities.

When we joined the project, there were several different donor management platforms, each with their own incompatible member logins and payment paths. We unified these platforms with a single user identity and added the ability to aggregate donation data from the previous platforms. We also cleaned up their partner relationships and built a Salesforce integration.

My contributions included:

• Implementing an OIDC identity provider and OAuth server, shared across all client web sites
• Designed and built a React-based donation widget with device fingerprinting, country limiting, and card testing mitigations
• Payment gateway integrations with Stripe and Flo2Cash
• Unified Google Analytics implementation across all client web sites
• Comprehensive Salesforce integration for donor management

The SPCA had more than 40 separate web sites, one for each branch in New Zealand.

We designed a new site with uniform branding, merged all of the content from the old sites into one, and then integrated all of their internal systems as well, allowing them to manage adoption and fostering programmes online, and manage their supporters through integrations with their CRM and donation payment platforms.

This project required more infrastructure work than usual, due to extremely high peak traffic levels.

I took care of:

• Project oversight and planning
• Payment gateway integrations
• Highly available, load-balanced web server infrastructure to handle peak demand.

An initiative of Auckland Council, Future Fit is a service to help people track their carbon footprint and make changes to reduce their impact on the environment. We designed and implemented the site.

This project was trickier than most web sites because the integrated calculator model was built from scratch and required a lot of scientific collaboration, testing, and verification to ensure they were correct.

On this project, I was responsible for:

• Application security hardening
• Asynchronous worker queue implementation
• SQL optimisations

Hika was an award-winning language learning tool, designed by a language education specialist from the University of Auckland to assist people learning Te Reo Māori through the use of high frequency words and phrases.

I wrote the first version of the application, which became the top title on the New Zealand App Store with over 125,000 users. I managed the transition to dedicated iOS and Android development teams, producing newer versions with the ability to purchase new language sets, and built the content management tools used to compile and serve language packs for download.

During this project, I did the following:

• Initial scoping and project management
• Developed the initial iPhone version of the application
• Developed a now obsolete Windows Mobile version of the application
• Developed the Windows desktop version of the application in C#
• Built the backend service for purchasing and downloading of language packs
• Built backend tools to support content editors
• Managed handover to dedicated Android and iOS development teams

Having an app at the top of the App Store is a once in a lifetime experience, simultaneously exciting and terrifying.