Australian Book Designers Association

ABDA came to me through a committee member I'd worked with on another project. The brief was a list of website issues, several described as "unfixable" by previous developers, and an awards platform that had to work for the next round of entries.

"Unfixable" usually means the previous developer didn't understand the problem or didn't have time to dig into it. In ABDA's case, both. The issues were real but solvable: careless custom code, plugin conflicts nobody had isolated, and configuration choices that had compounded over time. Fixing them meant reading the code, reproducing the bugs, and fixing the causes rather than papering over symptoms.

The awards platform was the higher-stakes piece. It runs once a year, takes entries from book designers across Australia, and can't fall over when entries open. The work stabilised the entry flow, fixed edge cases that had affected entrants in previous years, and made the platform reliable enough to run each year unsupervised.