Tom J. Watson

FREELANCE WEB DEVELOPER
MADRID, SPAIN

Hi, I'm Tom, a full-stack developer with 7 years experience working on high-availability, high-traffic web applications and APIs. I am also the founder of Artpip.

Recent Posts
  • Apr 12, 2018
    Decentralising the web with Dat and Beaker Browser

    As the world becomes ever more connected and dependent on the web, the prohibitive hurdles of hosting and serving your own content become more and more problematic. Humans are fundamentally social animals and the desire to share your content with the world is universal. However, as has become glaringly obvious over the past several months, people’s faith in centralised entities such as Facebook or Google to store and host your content is eroding at a pretty rapid rate. Users are desperate for a way to take back control of their data and experiences.

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My Work
Artpip

An app for macOS and Windows for setting fine art as your desktop background.

An electron-based desktop app for macOS and Windows that will set a new piece of fine art as your desktop background every day. The app also provides the ability to purchase a reproduction print of any artwork you like via the website. The app and website are powered by an API that sits on top a custom curated database of Artists/Artworks and >250GB of art. All the planning, designing and development of the app and website are done by me, as well as the creating of the art database and the curation of featured artworks.

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Break Timer

Chrome Extension for managing periodic breaks.

Break Timer allows you to set up customizable breaks and will remind you to take them. Taking breaks whilst working or studying is crucial in preventing RSI, eye-strain and tiredness.

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mountains.io

A map-based web app for discovering the world’s mountains.

A web application for browsing the mountains of the world using Google Maps. Zoom and pan around the map to find significant peaks in an area or use the search box to find a mountain. Click a marker to reveal information about each mountain, and click through to the full page view to find further information and discussion. Also my first major experience of getting burned for hot-linking to 3rd party resources - Freebase API has since shutdown taking all images with it, meaning the images of the mountains are no longer available. Lesson learned.

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Reddit Comment Collapser

A more elegant solution for collapsing reddit comment trees

Collapse a comment and all of it’s replies by clicking on the column of the comment you wish to collapse. No longer get stuck in the middle of a huge comment chain - simply select the outermost column to collapse the whole top-level-comment.

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