Hi there!
I'm a London-based front-end developer with ten years of experience, specialising in interactive data-visualisation and responsive, performant web applications.
I often work with React and D3, and am interested in accessibility, open web standards and usability.
My work has been featured in publications including:
Originally from New Zealand, I'm currently living in London and happily employed at QuantumBlack / McKinsey. I also help organise and coach at codebar, a non-profit initiative that aims to help improve diversity in the tech community through weekly programming workshops.
When I'm not designing the web I can be found climbing, skiing, unicycling, and occasionally attempting to juggle.
Web and interactive designer Richard Westenra…[is]…extremely thoughtful, perceptive and witty
Richard has been invaluable both in his elegant code and his unflustered approach to handling giant data.
Sometimes his head looks a bit like a pineapple
Articles & things
Client work
- Ventures of the PayPal Mafia Fleximize 2016
- Very British Attitudes to Money Totally Money 2016
- The View From Here Somfy 2015
- The Gender Pay Gap Michael Page 2015
- The Food Capitals of Instagram Photoworld 2015
- The minimum payment trap Totally Money 2015
- Got Rhythm? Concert Hotels 2015
- How big is Snapchat? Photoworld 2015
- What we really value Totally Money 2015
- If the UK were 100 Businesses Simply Business 2015
- Difficult Second Album Syndrome Concert Hotels 2015
- By the book: What age did the greatest authors publish their most famous works? Blinkbox Books 2015
- Beyond the Bay: Comparing the world’s top startup ecosystems Simply Business 2014
- Charting the Careers of Music’s Biggest Stars Concert Hotels 2014
- If You Printed All The Instagram Pics Uploaded in a Year Photoworld 2014
- How Adventurous Are You? Travelex 2014
- What Career Is Right For Me? Rasmussen College 2014
- The Minimal Music Quiz Concert Hotels 2013
- Name That Uniform Blue Cotton 2013
- The Capacity of an iPod Visualized as Vinyl Concert Hotels 2013
- 90's Nostalgia Quiz Two Little Fleas 2013
- Which TV Series Should I Watch Next? CableTV.com 2013
- What Career Should I Choose? Rasmussen College 2013
- The Career Aptitude Test Rasmussen College 2013
Linkblog
- Lost in translation: a primer for cultural differences in design and analytics
- Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk’s Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free
- The English question - Little England may have undone Great Britain. Will a nation of dark fascism or one of green and pleasant lands emerge?
- Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable?
- How algorithms rule our working lives
- How Nextdoor reduced racist posts by 75%
- Should Prostitution Be a Crime?
- Brexit Blues
- The Languages Which Almost Became CSS
- Edward Snowden’s Strangely Free Life – As a Robot
- Design Better Forms
- America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny
- How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley
- Why Do the Poor Make Such Poor Decisions?
- How Dating Has Always Been Like Work
- This Is What the Future of American Politics Looks Like - For political observers, 2016 feels like an earthquake.
- The Chernobyl Story
- Uncanny Valley - I would say more, but I signed an NDA.
- Hillsborough disaster: deadly mistakes and lies that lasted decades
- How to Negotiate a Raise (If You’re a Woman). - First, as you are a woman, stop crying.
- Words, Words, Words: On Toxicity and Abuse in Online Activism
- How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell
- The Deep Roots of Javascript Fatigue - I recently jumped back into frontend development for the first time in months, and I was immediately struck by one thing: everything had changed. When I was more active in the frontend community, the changes seemed minor.
- Change your channel (video)
- None of the Above - What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race.
- Against Activism
- The 100 Funniest Jokes in the History of Twitter
- Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems With Digital Colonialism
- Out of the Mist: An Alternate History of New Zealand Film
- You probably know to ask yourself, “What do I want?” Here’s a way better question
- How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity
- Brave New War - A new form of conflict emerged in 2015—from the Islamic State to the South China Sea.
- How Pauline Hanson was stopped
- The Middle East Friendship Chart
- Why Attacking ISIS Won’t Make Americans Safer - For close to a decade, the trauma of the Iraq War left Americans wary of launching new wars in the Middle East. That caution is largely gone.