Hi there!
I'm a Christchurch-based front-end developer with more than twelve 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.
An alumnus of McKinsey and former codebar organiser, my work has been featured in publications including:
After a decade in London, I'm now back in New Zealand and currently looking for remote work. When I'm not developing the web I can be found climbing, skiing, mountain-biking, 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.