I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Runna (acquired by Strava in 2025), a running coaching app with personalised training plans.

I started on community, moved through the app, and tech-led activities before leading Runna's work in Strava Experience. I've since moved to platform, leading app infrastructure. Day to day I work across TypeScript, React Native, AWS, and GraphQL: product features and the platform they run on.

Before Runna I was at PwC, first through the Flying Start degree apprenticeship with the University of Leeds (Computer Science, First Class) and then as an associate. I started building software at school, including student-run tools at Wellington College. Those earlier projects are below.

I care about products that help people, hard problems, and owning the standard of the work.

About Me

This project started as an idea to solve an ongoing problem with the event space inside Leeds. I decided to draft a web app to solve this problem, and in collaberation with some of my fellow students at the Unversity of Leeds we had a solution.  
  
For those who aren't as well versed in student culture at the University, Leeds itself is very much a party town, with over 10 clubs, over 50,000 students and a famous bar crawl where people dress up to drink in 16 pubs down one road. This requires a lot of organisation for different club nights and events hosting, and a method of selling and distributing the tickets. Therefore a space opened up for a large number of apps to come in as the ticket selling market. Fatsoma, FIXR, Skiddle were a few of these big names. And so the Leeds student community had a surplus of events apps to look for different nights out.  
  
That's where we came in. We combined all of these apps into one feed, desinged for students. This feed was updated daily, and was constantly changing. The UI was designed to showcase what was good on a night, if you were looking for a club night in Leeds. It was as easy as going to the website, searching or scrolling for a bit to see what you liked the look of, then clicking through to the ticketing website to place your order for different tickets. Simple.

We dubbed this project 'LS6 Events' as LS6 is arguably one of the most popular student postcodes in Leeds, and the project was founded there. We set up a company and expanded the ticketing options. After a launch in September 2022, we gained over 1000 users within the first week.

The project was written in Go, running a microservices architecture in Kubernetes - having an API for interfacing with the database for the backend, and the frontend being powered by Next. We also experimented with an AI microservice written in FastAPI, which we did not finish.  
  
_Note: as of Summer 2023, we have put the project on hold to rewrite certain crucial systems due to cloud hosting financials._

I used Go heavily at PwC for services. I still reach for it; TypeScript is what I write most days.

This site runs on Next.js. It is not the stack I write at work most days.

Next.js

LS6 Events

WellyCompSci was a student-led organisation I founded to teach other pupils about industry level programming technqiues while developing projects to learn about how businesses work in this career field by setting up our own inside Wellington College, UK.

Let's start from the beginning. In my 2nd year at Wellington I came up with the idea to write a 'sign in sign out' system for keeping track of people's movement in and out of the house, a project which I used to hone my skills. It was from that project that I started to get some attention and support from people around the college as a showcase of what I can do.

Introducing Mr John Hooper, of [hooperjon.com](https://hooperjon.com/) who arrived during my 2nd year at the college to be head of the computer science department. He was entrigued by my skills, as one of his ambitions was in student-led learning, i.e. students teaching each other instead of the traditional classroom model, and he said it was clear that I knew more actual programming knowledge than he did, as he was a teacher not a programmer. So it was his goal to create a platform for students to learn off other students. We brainstormed for a while, before coming up with WellyCompSci.  

The name WellyCompSci is an abbreviation for **Well(y)**ington College **Comp**uter **Sci**ence, that we shortened to form our group. The mission statement is archived [here](https://www.wellycompsci.org.uk). I headed this up as the first President (19/20), helped by Arjun Naha of [Naha Digital](https://www.nahadigital.co.uk) as my Vice President, we set to work building a platform to teach other students at the college how to program to industry level standards, mainly Web Development technologies.

So as we began to build up a group of people who would become our WellyCompSci 'interns', to be promoted to Junior then Senior Programmers. Over time we created a society full of talented individuals who could be relied apon to complete tasks and we could start our first major project, [myWelly](https://www.willmann.me.uk/projects/mywelly).

WellyCompSci

[https://www.coronaunity.org](https://www.coronaunity.org)

I was a lead developer during the 1st lockdown over the summer using student volunteers, helping out Jim & Ayden with creating their website.

React is how I build UI, on the web and underneath React Native.

React

CoronaUnity

myWelly was my first big task in leading a team, to create a Prep and Timetable managment tool for Wellington College, my secondary school based in Crowthorne, UK.

This project took a long time to come together, as it was a big undertaking from setup. I feature in this podcast where we talk about how it came together. As we were working on creating the video learning platform, we were also coming up with an idea to create a prep and timetable managment system for our college, as the current ones over the years hadn't been up to the standard that we would've liked. iSAMS, Firefly, SOCS, myDay, all these different services our college, in our opinion had wasted thousands of pounds paying for these services which they had capable students who could write a bespoke solution for much cheaper. So with the Computer Science budget behind us, and our bounding ambition ahead of us, we strived ahead with planning and designing this app.

Our first step was to get approval from the college. That way, when we started to properly develop we could ask for data without seeking approval every single time. We had used Mr Hooper to ask for approval from the IT Services team, as we thought it would be easier to attempt a task of this magnitude with the support of the college and to actually see if people would be willing to back a project like this. Long story short, the answer was yes - let's do this.

For the timeline at this point of view, I was ending 5th Form - Year 11 - and I was starting to focus on my GCSE's at this point, so this project took a bit of a backfoot, and the team I was working with consisted of Lower Sixth students (Year 12) who were doing their ASs at the time as well, so we didn't manage to progress too far. I had managed to at this points hook into the college user account authentication and lesson's database, as IT Support had graciously provided. At this point, we were writing the project in vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript and basic PHP, something we all were a bit more comfortable in. However looking back, we could have never have achieved the scale of the project that we did using this organisation style, partly due to our collective lack of experience. We called it at this point PASS.

![PASS](../images/projects/mywelly/pass.png)

Now at this time, I had written my sign in system, a fundamental starting project that set me on this career path, which you can check out here. The relevenant piece of information here is that I familiarised myself with React.js and Nodejs to make an updated version, to which I realised that the MERN stack is a futureproof technology stack, so we should plan to create myWelly with it.

Introducing Arjun Naha, of Naha Digital. Arjun joined when I was in Year 13, Upper 6th. During the previous year our idea basically grounded itself out slowly. He was in the year below me, and the first computer science scholar. While setting up WellyCompSci, we had designed and put together the idea to actually take myWelly as a concept and make it a reality.

During this year I had created a web app for our Monday Night Football league, which actually showed the students and staff that our team could create some really powerful tools for helping out the admins and more.

![MNF](../images/projects/mywelly/mnf.png)

As between Arjun and myself we had never attempted a project on this scale before. We knew the theory, we knew what to do, but at the end of the day all this work was new to us. Our first steps were to do some preliminary designs - nothing major but some ideas on where to start.

![Login Page](../images/projects/mywelly/login-page.png)

![Preliminary designs](../images/projects/mywelly/preliminary-designs.png)

So with these ideas we manged to start converting the project from a simple displaying of timetable data that IT Services graciously provided to an actual useful piece of software for students and staff alike.

Our first steps were to figure out how to authenticate the students/staff. At the present moment we had access to the LDAP database and used that for autentication, but unfortunately that method was a bit rudamentary, and not too future-proof. Arjun, fortunately, had a better idea. We could use OpenID Connect to authenticate the devices using the Microsoft OAuth API. We managed to register our application, and create an authentication method between our Reactjs frontend and Node.js backend.

Our next problem was figuring out where we were going to get our data from. We had managed to communicate with IT Services, who gave us access to the database storing the information from iSAMS - which included timetable data, classes, users, houses and locations - departments and others.

With access to all of the data, we started to put things together. The first function we made was the timetable page, using the data we were provided to present it in a visually appealing format.

![Timetable page](../images/projects/mywelly/timetable-page.png)

And then we allowed the teachers to set preps for the students, which was another of our big functions.

![Prep Screen](../images/projects/mywelly/prep-screen.png)

Putting all this together, with more refinements, and we can see it begins to take shape:

![Final myWelly](../images/projects/mywelly/final-mywelly.png)

And at this point, we've begun to upload this to AWS, using MongoDB Atlas for the frontend and AWS Elastic Beanstalk for the backend, with Cloudfront for the frontend distributing to an S3 instance.

At this point we began work on a React Native native iOS/Android app for the same effect. This development was easier as we had all the functions prebuilt on the web platform.

During this point, we had released to some select students as beta testing to find bugs while we worked, and we came up with an idea for a 'tiles' system, full of different clickable links for the students to use.

![Tiles screen](../images/projects/mywelly/tiles-screen.png)

Each of these links are clickable, dynamic and unique to the user, a feature of the system I am very proud of.

Once we had developed this feature, we released it to the college, starting with a staff meeting and then a college wide assembly.

One of the proudest moments of my life so far would definitely be releasing a project that Arjun, myself and the team had spent the better part of 6 months developing, and hearing the feedback. It had been very, very well recieved, with good words coming in from all around.

I have always been extremely pleased with this project, as it was an amazing learning experience on how to create an application on this scale.

![WellyCompSci Leadership](../images/projects/mywelly/wellycompsci-leadership.png)

*(Gregor, Will, Arjun)*

Above: Gregor (Vice President 2019-20, President 2020-21), Will (President 2018-19), Arjun (Vice President 2018-19, President 2019-20)

Node is the runtime for our TypeScript services, including Nest.js on ECS.

Node.js

AWS is the cloud I work on now. App infrastructure sits here: DynamoDB, Lambda, ECS, with Terraform for the bits we define as code.

myWelly

TypeScript is the language I write most days, across the Runna app and platform services.

TypeScript

React Native is how we ship the Runna app. Most of my product work lives here.

React Native

GraphQL is how the app talks to our services, on the client and the API.

GraphQL

Expo is how we ship React Native, including over-the-air updates.

Hello!

I'm Will Mann

And I'm a Senior Software Engineer