nextjs

11 posts
Doug SilkstoneLiving mockups

Living mockups

Editable 3D product mockups with live screens and LED walls

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

View Living mockups project
  • 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.
Open the studyHow it was built
#typescript#react#nextjs#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.

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.
Read article
Doug Silkstone

Hogsend

Lifecycle messaging for software teams

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

View Hogsend project

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.

hogsend.com
#typescript#react#nextjs#nodejs#postgres#hatchet#lifecycle#attribution#docker#railway
Doug Silkstone

Dinners With Friends

Hosted dinners that help people make friends

CTO · Built the brand, booking platform, apps and search programme

Read the full case study

Dinners With Friends brings people together to make friends over hosted meals at local venues across South West England. As CTO for the relaunch, the role covered the website, mobile apps, bookings, payments and host tools, alongside the brand, customer acquisition and analytics needed to run the business.

  • Relaunched a Social for Good concept that seats strangers around one table, first run twenty years ago by Pamela Silkstone.
  • Took the relaunch from a napkin sketch to an operating events business: brand, digital products, ticketing, operations and acquisition.
  • Built and ran the web product, the mobile apps and the internal operations platform.

dinnerswithfriends.co.uk
#typescript#react#reactnative#expo#nextjs#hono#postgres#gcp#stripe#seo#lifecycle#growth
Doug Silkstone

RaceMake

Live telemetry and analysis for sim racers

Interim technical lead · Led architecture, team and delivery

View RaceMake project

RaceMake helps sim racers understand their driving through live car and lap data, AI-assisted analysis and interactive 3D visualisations. The interim technical leadership role covered architecture, team leadership and delivery across the desktop app, web app and the data pipelines connecting them.

  • Led architecture and delivery across a Rust/Tauri desktop app and React web app.
  • Rebuilt both clients around extensible high-frequency telemetry pipelines and per-game adapters.
  • Built an AI pit team and interactive 3D visualisations on top of live telemetry.
racemake.com
#rust#tauri#typescript#react#nextjs#telemetry#llms#leadership
Doug Silkstone

WithSeismic

Independent product engineering and growth

Founder · Scoped, built and supported 100+ client engagements

View WithSeismic project

WithSeismic is an independent product-engineering business that builds software, analytics and marketing automation for client teams. As founder and sole operator, the role spans finding the commercial problem, scoping the work, designing and building the solution, and supporting it after launch.

  • Delivered 100+ product-engineering engagements over 10 years for clients including Framer, The Motley Fool, Groupon, Contra and Weedmaps.
  • Scoped, priced, delivered and supported every technical build independently.
  • Runs a fixed ten-business-day, £12,000 Revenue Loop Sprint that finds one material commercial leak and ships one corrective system into production.

withseismic.com
#typescript#react#nextjs#nodejs#python#llms#aws#gcp#postgres
Brian TigheHead of Technology @ The Motley Fool

Doug is a pro. I'd hire him again for any future marketing & technology initiatives.

Verified on Clutch5.0
Doug SilkstoneGrowth Society

Growth Society

Ecommerce benchmarking for 200 UK brands

Product engineering · Built the interactive MVP in four weeks

View Growth Society project

Growth Society's ecommerce benchmarking project turned a static industry report into an interactive way to explore and compare brands. The engagement covered building the MVP, bringing performance data, brand profiles and analyst commentary together in a web product.

  • Built an ecommerce benchmarking report in a four-week MVP sprint.
  • Compared the UK's 200 largest brands using KPIs, screenshots and analyst commentary.
#ecommerce#growth#nextjs
Doug SilkstoneHelix.ai

Helix.ai

Research website for an AI lab

Design & frontend · Built the public research site

View Helix.ai project

This Helix.ai project was a research website intended to explain an AI lab's work to both technical and non-technical visitors. The engagement covered the site's visual design and frontend implementation, not the underlying research platform.

  • Designed and built a research site for an LLM lab.
#llms#react#nextjs#typescript
Doug Silkstone

Patrianna

Games for a social-casino platform

Studio leadership · Hired the team and shipped five games to 1M players

View Patrianna project
  • Built an in-house game studio from zero and shipped five high-stakes React games to 1M players.
  • Hired and led the cross-functional frontend, game-development and QA team.
  • Owned monetisation, retention, experiments and telemetry.
  • Owned product architecture, delivery, team structure and production quality for a top-three social casino.
#typescript#react#nextjs#redux#postgres#datadog#growth#leadership
Doug Silkstone

getBenson

Coupon-extension protection for ecommerce

Founder & technical lead · Built, operated and sold the platform

View getBenson project

getBenson helped online retailers detect coupon extensions at checkout, prevent unwanted discount-code use and measure the effect on revenue and attribution. As founder and technical lead, the role covered rebuilding the MVP for production, running the platform, technical sales and customer onboarding through to the sale of the business.

  • Built a SaaS platform that detected and blocked browser-extension coupon leakage across 25M monthly sessions and 500+ stores.
  • Rebuilt the MVP as a typed, tested production system with real-time GraphQL revenue analytics.
  • Led technical sales and onboarded 80+ ecommerce brands.
  • Operated the product for nearly three years, then sold it.
#typescript#react#nextjs#nodejs#graphql#postgres#datadog#attribution