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Doug Silkstone•Digital patterns

Digital patterns

Generative poster system for an events programme

Design & engineering · Built the pattern engine, editor and export

A story generator for a week of club nights: six animated pattern families — pixel, angular, wave and more — each seeded, coloured and typeset into a poster that stays legible at any scale.
Every field on every poster is editable in place: date, genre, headline, colour, pattern scale and animation speed, with a one-click regenerate per poster.
Posters export as stills for print and social, so the same system that runs on screen produces the programme's artwork.

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#typescript #react #motion #designsystems

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Doug Silkstone•Living mockups

Living mockups

Editable 3D product mockups with live screens and LED walls

Design & engineering · Built the scenes, surface mappings and inline editor

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A set of Three.js product scenes — a newspaper, a phone in hand, a reflection room and an industrial laptop — where every screen, page and LED surface is a live, editable texture rather than a flat render.
The headline and the artwork are edited inline; the change lands on the curved wall, the reflections and the phone display at once, because each surface is mapped back to one shared source.
Backgrounds are generated, the reflection and emissive shaders are hand-written, and the whole set runs in the browser at interactive frame rates.
Part of the Studies & Experiments gallery: a collection of standalone scenes that can be dragged, played and inspected.

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#typescript #react #nextjs #motion #designsystems

Doug Silkstone•Studies & Experiments

Studies & Experiments

Interactive studies in 3D, shaders, sound and motion

Design & engineering · Built every scene, instrument and interaction

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A gallery of standalone scenes: a full event lighting show, a playable Silksong room, editable living mockups, trading cards with prismatic foil, a working Roland 303 and 909 rack, a repair bench and a gravitational-lens shader.
Each plate is its own build — Three.js scenes, custom GLSL, Web Audio, soft-body physics and print-style typography — and each responds to the pointer, keyboard or touch.
The gallery itself is a piece of the work: a printed-sheet metaphor with registration marks, tape stock and a lens that pulls back while the sheet travels, plus a presentation mode that hides every instrument for demos and recordings.

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#typescript #react #motion #designsystems

Doug Silkstone

From a napkin sketch to a year of full tables

In November 2024, Dinners With Friends was a revived idea and a napkin sketch. By the start of September 2026, it had welcomed more than 500 guests across 50 dinners. Dates were routinely selling out six to eight weeks ahead, and nearly all of the remaining 2026 calendar was booked.

Pamela Silkstone first ran the concept twenty years earlier: put people who have never met around one table, give them a host, and make the first conversation easier. I took the relaunch from idea to first version, first paying customers and a business with more demand than seats. Along the way I built the brand, website, booking system, internal tools, mobile app and the search programme that now brings new people in.

The search programme delivered 5,530 Google clicks in June–August 2026, up 66.1% on the previous three months, alongside 381,345 search impressions. Building and maintaining a library of local guides gave the business a way to be discovered by people looking for food, activities and places to meet across Exeter and Devon.

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dinnerswithfriends.co.uk

#typescript #react #reactnative #expo #nextjs #hono #postgres #railway #stripe #seo #ai #lifecycle #attribution #growth

Dinners With Friends homepage showing the event-discovery and booking experience — The live product joins discovery, social proof, availability and booking in one path.

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Doug Silkstone

Hogsend

Lifecycle messaging for software teams

Founder & CTO · Built the product, journey engine and cloud platform

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Hogsend lets software teams automate onboarding, customer messaging and retention in TypeScript rather than a visual workflow builder. The founder and CTO role covered the whole product: strategy, design, the journey engine, developer tools, cloud infrastructure and launch.

Built lifecycle marketing as code, with journeys reviewed in pull requests and tested before release.
Shipped the TypeScript development kit, journey engine, automated tests, Studio, command-line tools and MCP tools.
Built journeys that survive restarts, provider failures and releases while running for days or weeks.

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hogsend.com