Mark Pendergast

Lead Developer

Working for Justice Connect has been an absolute honour. They brought me on as a Lead Developer to grow and modernise our Pro Bono Portal both nationally and internationally. We’ve now rolled it out to 10 different countries, upgrading it from Laravel 6 to Laravel 11, moving PHP to 8.2, and modernising the Vue.js frontend along the way. We’ve also translated and localised it for multiple regions, and achieved 100% uptime for two consecutive years — a huge leap from the multi-day outages that used to happen during releases.

I’ve also led the charge with our Firm Manager platform, a standalone Laravel/Vue app designed to help pro bono firms manage their matters. I originally developed it for individual firms, then transitioned it into a multi-tenant SaaS, and containerised it using Docker for portability and consistent environments.

Beyond the technical side, I’ve worked hard to lift our delivery velocity by improving ticketing, prioritisation, and backlog management, so the team can focus on high-value work. I’ve promoted strong engineering practices, introduced Scrum-based workflows, and built a supportive remote team culture. Along the way, I also engineered a secure encryption tool to allow confidential data sharing between courts and law firms, meeting strict compliance and privacy standards — all while mentoring a small but talented team and helping them grow their skills and confidence.

Business Analyst

Detector Inspector brought me on for a short term role, an excellent opportunity to gain experience as a Business Analyst in a fast growing company. I supported the Data Science team, and showed them the huge speed multipliers to be found using tools like Jira & Agile.

Lead Developer

No Moss bought me on as a Lead Developer to work on their latest fintech client. I assisted that client in building their latest release, and introduced them to the concept of continuous integration and Cypress testing suites.

After finishing up with that client, I started with a new innovative Australian investment bank. Along side my fantastic team, I built their research analyst portal from the ground up, using a Vue JS frontend interacting with a Dell Boomi backend. This required a lot of client interactions (as full documentation was not available yet), and plenty of expectation management.

Founder, Lead Developer

I founded FreightMate Systems while being a stay at home Dad. I saw a need for an easy-to-use freight management system that could coexist alongside more established players. Using a tried and tested tech stack, I created a system that required little to no training to use, could deploy on any device that had internet access, and could be customisable depending on the wants and needs of the customer. I focused heavily on speed and ease-of-use, while still maintaining secure encryption and user privacy.

FreightMate Systems was acquired by Tuco (a freight broker), I was able to focus on some of the big challenges we were facing, and worked to develop some big features, like a carrier integration system, an in-depth reporting system, a despatch email customisation template, and a more secure login protocol. Having completed all that, I decided it was time for me to move on to my next technical challenge.

Scrum.org

Swinburne University of Technology

Swinburne University of Technology