Australian Book Designers Association

ABDA came to me via a committee member I'd worked with on another project — the kind of referral that's only useful if the work backs it up. The brief was a list of issues with the Australian Book Designers Association website, several of which had been described as "unfixable" by the previous developers, and an annual awards platform that needed to work properly for the next round of entries.

"Unfixable" usually means one of two things — either the previous developer didn't understand the problem, or didn't have the time to dig into it properly. In ABDA's case, both. The issues were real, but they were also tractable: bugs in custom code that hadn't been written carefully, plugin conflicts that no-one had isolated, configuration choices that had compounded over time. None of it required exotic knowledge — just the willingness to actually read the code, reproduce the bugs, and fix the underlying causes rather than papering over symptoms.

The awards platform was the higher-stakes piece. It runs once a year, has to handle every Australian book designer's entries, and absolutely cannot be falling over when the entry window opens. The work there focused on stabilising the entry flow, fixing edge cases that had affected entrants in previous years, and making sure the platform was robust enough for an unsupervised annual run.