Universal Music Group (via New Reach Consulting)

What was wrong

A catalogue data dump had to be reconciled against the internal rights database, and the feed had to be specified well enough that outside organisations could build interfaces from it without seeing UMG's internals. Separately, the core queries took thirty seconds.

What I built

Reconciled the dump field by field and wrote the feed specification as two deliberately separated documents — a functional description with internal processing stripped out, and an implementation document written so it could be handed to any outside organisation. Later, for the same consultancy, architected a festival ticketing and cashless-payment system: scheduled cloud jobs pulling events and venues from three ticketing platforms into a curation screen, with a point-of-sale for festival vendors that charged a customer's in-app wallet. The requirements existed only as PowerPoints and PSDs that contradicted each other, so I refused to start from screens and drove activity and sequence diagrams first.

What happened

Core query times from thirty seconds to under one. The only client relationship in the archive still live at its end.