Elegant websites for Elves
We build and design websites with a holistic, spiritual and ecological focus.
I’m Daniel Shields. A software developer that’s recently completed a Masters in Entrepreneurship and I have a decade of experience building websites and applications for my own start-ups.

Featured Projects
View portfolio




- L/L Research — Home of The Law of One material, L/L Research is a non-profit organization dedicated to discovering and sharing information to aid in the spiritual evolution of humankind.
- Orbits — A simple website for astrology charts without any of the clutter or advertising found on other sites.
- Plotty — An alternative gardening brand, with an online seed swapping platform. We created an entire brand manual for the startup with some mockups of how things might look in the future.
- TwentyFifty — Contact work developing a tool to analyse risk in the fashion industry and textiles supply chain.
- Sendtao — Designed for rollout of remote projects, providing reports that allow customer, stakeholders, supervisory and project management teams real time access to site progress information.
Services
Code
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Full-stack development
Either full-stack Javascript or products a mix with PHP / Laravel backends.
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Front-end development
Front-end Javascript applications with React or Vue, Laravel Livewire etc.
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Backend & Servers
Server architecture and development. APIs and micro-services, scaling, queues, distributed servers, serverless apps.
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APIs & CI
API design and deployment, continuous integration or server configuration.
Design
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Branding & Logos
Multimedia work like branding, design, logos, presentations, business cards, posters, etc for companies and friends.
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Website design
Design and coding of static websites, including designing for a11y web accessibility standards for impaired users.
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Print design
Print design, such as posters, business cards or company documents.
Business
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Startup Prototypes (MVP)
I'm capable of rapidly building quick (MVP) prototypes that can be used to show investors, test and get feedback from users, before refining the idea more.
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Business Plans
I can shape your business plan, help you identity your target market and make sure that the prototype is a viable product that your customers will love.
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Technical advice
Need advice for your startup or idea? I can provide technical advice or consulting to help you avoid any technical pit-falls.
Recent Articles
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Agile methodology
A brief overview of Agile methodology and how our team applied these principles to our startup.
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Post modern views on Failure
As I attempt to understand failure and its meaning, this work is a postmodern discourse on the subject, and how we approach and respond to failure in the modern world.
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Scientific Paradigms and Disruption
I compared the disruption of paradigms—something that embodies a conceptual framework in which we perceive the world (Chalmers, 1978) with how a start-up functions by finding anomalies and solving a problem that no one had considered before.
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Working with emotional models in an artificial life simulation
The aim of the project was to create a testbed for the simulation of an artificial life in which emotional models could be observed in action, as well as provide a method of monitoring and interacting with the simulation.
Code Gists
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Configuring CloudFront for static websites
It can be a lot more difficult than you'd expect to properly configure AWS S3 with CloudFront to serve simple static websites with sub-pages.
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From Zero to Spock
How to configure and set up an Amazon EC2 server with SSH keys for Statamic and Git Integration for Spock.
Resume
Education
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Falmouth University
MA Entrepreneurship, 2018-20
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University of Hertfordshire
BSc (Hons) Computer Science, 2014
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University of Pretoria
BIS. Multimedia, 2008-12
Training
- Authentic Self Empowerment (ASE) Facilitator
- Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique (QHHT)
- Transpersonal Hypnotherapy Practitioner
- Traditional Jikiden Reiki (Shoden)
- Karuna + Lightarean Reiki
- Western Reiki I, II, Advanced
- Astrology