What We’ve Been Up To: June 2026

June has been all about our clients, and I’m really happy with what we’re delivering together.

Celebrating Success

It’s always a proud moment when our work feeds directly into a client’s success, and this month handed us a few of those. Reto Finance had their best-ever month for loans written, less than a year on from launching their new website, with our Google Ads and paid social campaigns converting visitors into enquiries at around 20%.

Over at MS-RT Leasing we’re on course for a record month of enquiries, having delivered over 200 grade-A quality leads (their words) in a single week and 99 over one weekend, and the records we keep breaking are our own. Over six years working alongside them, that means a lot.

None of this happens in isolation. The clients who give us open, honest feedback are the ones we do our best work with, because regular feedback allows us to optimise campaigns and attract right audience to their products. When both sides are committed to the same outcome, the results are clear and measurable. So a genuine thank you to every client who trusts us with their growth and tells us straight what’s landing and what isn’t.

World Cup Fever!

Outside of work, the World Cup is back! The first World Cup I can remember was 1994, ironically in USA. I look forward to it every time and I’m watching as many matches as I can, though the overnight kick-offs make it difficult. The only shame is the political undertone hanging over the tournament. It was probably the same in ’94 and I was just too young to know what’s going on. There’s been some good games and plenty of goals already, and it’s obviously coming home…

Security and Performance

We’ve been spending a lot of focus in June on improving security and performance of websites. I have enjoyed reviewing code and implementing ways in which we can make our websites and applications more secure. With the recent power of AI tools, this has become more important than ever. While this may be a terrifying prospect, it is also an opportunity for us to use AI to spot vulnerabilities before launching which otherwise could have been missed.

AI code reviewing has also given us plenty of opportunity to speed applications up as well. It’s now never been easier to identify inefficient code or slow queries that would overall slowdown a user’s experience. With this capability at our fingertips, I am looking forward to the quality that can now be delivered.

Re-mortgaging and Binge Watching

We’ve had the job of sorting out our documents and applying for a remortgage which has thankfully gone smoothly. We celebrated with a couple of TV nights in, and binge watched the new Boroughs Netflix show. I found it to be a slow start, but we ended up getting super into it. We also watched a few films old and new like E.T and the new Michael Jackson film.

The Heatwave

As everyone has been overly familiar with, we have had a heatwave which has not been very enjoyable. I’m one of those winter types that enjoys the freezing cold way more than the scorching heat, so these heatwaves always get me checking the weather app to look forward to cooler weather. We went through a lot of ice and ice cream to get through it all. On the bright side though I’ve now got a new coffee machine to look forward to for my birthday in July to replace the cheap one I bought which just blew up and popped the fuses for the house.

What I’ve Been Building

Most of June went into a website for a company that installs heat pumps, solar panels, battery storage and EV chargers. It was a really fun build, and the kind of project where there was room to do something a bit more interesting with it.

We stepped up the animation on this one and leaned into the subtle techniques that make a site stand out. Small, considered touches rather than anything flashy, things you might not clock on the first scroll, but together they give the whole thing some character and make it feel a step above a standard business site. That’s usually where the fun is, the little details that pull it all together.

I also wrapped up the build I’d been working on at the start of the month, and the feedback on that one has been good. Always satisfying getting a site to that finished stage and seeing it land well with the client.

Away From the Screen

Busy one. Drove down to Bristol to see a mate who’s moved over there. Long drive, but the place is great and well worth it. He had a housewarming which was a good night, and we ended up at a sausage and cider festival and caught Scouting for Girls. They’ve got a couple of bangers I’d half forgotten about.

The week after I headed down south for my girlfriend’s birthday to visit her family. The weather was great the whole time, so plenty of sitting in the garden with a few beers and going out for some nice food. Hard to beat a few days like that.

I’ve also picked up golf, which has been a humbling experience so far. Mostly it means a lot of wandering into the woods to retrieve balls I’m convinced I hit straight. Early days, but I’m enjoying it, even if my scorecard isn’t.

What’s Next

Good month all round. Good builds, a trip away, a birthday, and a new hobby to be bad at. July’s looking busy too, so plenty to get stuck into. On to it.

Zipline

Early in the month I took a trip with some friends to northern Wales, the area around Bangor. We stayed in this cozy but spacious cottage in what felt like the middle of nowhere. The main event of the weekend was a big zipline over a slate quarry, and it was awesome. They reckon you go 100 mile an hour, and that it’s the worlds fastest, which is quite the claim. It sure was fast. Other than that we spent the weekend drinking and soaking in the hot tub, which was nice because the weather was quite chilly a that point.

Do ya Like DAGs?

At work I’ve been investigating better ways to build some of our apps. One thing I’ve been looking into is Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), which let you define a multi-path journey. We do a surprising amount of that at Twilo: projects with branching question flows, where your previous answers determine what gets asked next. A DAG is made up of nodes and edges, which in our case are the questions and the paths between them, so it describes this kind of structure elegantly. A tool like Mermaid can then turn the graph straight into a diagram, which makes it much easier to see every possible pathway at once. The Mermaid format has another benefit too: you can author your DAG in it first, then have AI convert that into code or data later. That hugely reduces the mental overhead of working on each branching graph.

Busy Bees

June has been a strange month weather-wise, with the usual June rain dominating the first half of the month followed eventually by some sunshine and then a heatwave. We’ve been busy throughout it all at work with lots of long-term projects and some new ones on the horizon. Our new BDMs Dom and Uzair have been hard at work behind the scenes making contacts and scoping out potential projects.

A Trip to Germany

Away from work the highlight of my month was a short trip to Berlin, somewhere I’ve always wanted to see. A walking tour on our first day was a great way to see all the main sights – the Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall, Holocaust Memorial, Brandenburg Gate and even the spot where Hitler’s bunker is buried under the ground – now with a car park covering it! Our hotel was a beautiful building that used to be a Telegraph Office, restored in an Art Deco 1930’s style. Berlin also has a ‘museum island’ near the river and a world-class zoo which even has pandas!

I also enjoyed a visit to Brodsworth Hall near Doncaster, an English Heritage site which boasts lovely grounds and unusual gardens. A highlight for me was the rose garden, planted in Victorian times, complete with arch-covered pathways to wander through.