I build digital platforms. And I fix the ones that are already in trouble.
I'm Alex Bennett, a hands-on technical lead. I spend my working life inside enterprise Strapi implementations — the ones going well and the ones that aren't — after a decade building platforms agency-side and at the British Library. You get that experience directly: no account manager, no juniors learning on your budget.
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portfolioDeclare BYPASS_TOKEN and public site vars on the turbo build task (strict env mode stripped them on Vercel) -
weddingrsvp: bring deadline forward to 31 December 2026 -
libraries.globalrefactor(ui): eliminate LibrarySearchParams mapping shim in LibraryIndexGrid
Front End Developer in 2015. Technical Lead and Head of Web Development from 2020. Implementation Manager at Strapi since 2024. Agencies, a national institution, now the vendor.
Led web development at 43 Clicks North, then covered the Head of Web Development role at the British Library for a year during the postholder's parental leave.
My full-time role is at Strapi, inside enterprise implementations. The independent work on this site is separate from that role and cleared with my employer.
Led the web development team's interim service response in the hours after the 2023 British Library cyber attack, in collaboration with the Digital Engagement team.
What I do
Ways I plug in as an independent, hands-on technical lead. Scoped per engagement.
| code | service | description | format | typical |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| S/01 | Performance & Architecture Rescue | Your Strapi build is slow, fragile, or about to launch and you're not confident. I find out why, and fix it. | Fixed scope | 1–3 weeks |
| S/02 | Headless Build & Replatform | End-to-end delivery. Content model, migration, integration, launch, handover. Legacy CMS to headless, or a greenfield build done properly the first time. | Project | 8–16 weeks |
| S/03 | Interim Technical Lead | Stepping into the chair when you need a senior technical lead and don't have one. Direction, architecture decisions, code review, mentoring — and a team in better shape than I found it. | Retained | 3–6 months |
| S/04 | Public Sector & Accessible Delivery | Digital services built to GOV.UK standards and WCAG, by someone who's delivered inside a national institution and knows what procurement, accessibility audits and FOI-able decisions actually require. | Project or interim |
How I work
The operating principles behind every engagement.
No agency overhead
You talk to the person building it. No account manager, no discovery phase that produces a slide deck, no juniors learning on your budget.
AI-accelerated
The work that used to need a team of three is compressed. That's how one person delivers at agency pace — and why the economics are different.
You keep the knowledge
I'd rather leave your team able to run and extend the thing than leave you dependent on me. Handover isn't a phase at the end, it's how the work gets done.
Selected work
Case studies, abridged where confidentiality requires.
The British Library
A year covering Head of Web Development, and Technical Lead on LibraryOn. Led the web development team's interim response in the hours after the 2023 cyber attack.
Building High-Performance Strapi Apps: Common Pitfalls and Best Practices
Where Strapi performance problems actually come from, why populate=deep is a trap, and how to design schemas that don't get expensive as they grow.
What people say
Alex is an exceptional developer, a skilled technical lead, and an inspiring development mentor.
A fantastic source of knowledge and guidance for all things web… able to give advice at the right level to a diverse group of stakeholders.
Comfortable with small campaigns, websites and large scale enterprise sites.
06 · Get in touch
Planning a Strapi rollout? Let's talk.
I take a small number of engagements each year, deliberately. Best fit: teams with their own frontend engineers — whatever the framework — bringing Strapi in to replace a legacy CMS or stand up a new headless platform. Discovery calls are always free.