Professional Objective
I've been at my current employer for just over 2 years and I feel now is the right time to seek new challenges and opportunities. I would like to spend more time guiding developers as well as interacting with clients and working closely with managers, so their objectives can be clearly translated to fellow developers.
My long term ambition is to complete an MBA to further my people and business management skills.
Software development skill
Programming languages: C# (2 years), PHP (7 years), Java (2 years), Perl (7 years), Ruby, Fortran, Pascal.
Web Development and Services: PHP (7 years), ASP.net (2 years), JSP (2 years), SOAP (WS-* based), REST, Rails, JavaScript.
Database Experience: MySQL (6 years), PostGres (2 years), Informix (5 years), MS SQL Server (2 years), SQL (expert).
Agile development skill
Test Driven Development: C# (Visual Studio), PHP (PHPUnit), Java (JUnit).
Scrum: Scrum Master (certified), Scrum Practitioner (pending).
Continuous Integration: .Net (Visual Studio, CruiseControl.Net), Java (CruiseControl), PHP (phpUnderControl).
Aspect Oriented Programming: Java, PHP.
Behaviour Driven Development: Java, Ruby, PHP.
Operating system experience
Solaris (9 years), Windows (10 years), Linux (10 years), MacOS (8 years).
Employment History
Freelance and personal projects
These are projects that I've been either paid to do or have worked on as personal side projects unrelated to any specific employment.
Projects:
- Amazon S3 clone: A personal (in progress) project for me to discover how easy it is to develop a test driven agile project using REST and SOAP web services in PHP
- Rolls Royce Science Award: A contract project from EdComs to extend the client's existing site to provide a forum and fix bugs by the previous developers
- Kinder Surprise: I worked for Iris Nation to create a promotional website which provided free swimming for kids at their local pools using geolocation
- Adidas: A promotion managed by Iris Nation to collect global marketing information in multiple languages which was then integrated into the Adidas marketing database
Web21C Lead Developer
BT Design HQ Service Group
June 2006-Present
The goal of this project was to produce easy to use SDK's for internal and external developers using agile development methods; initially for 5 services: SMS, VoiceCall, ConferenceCall, Location, WhiteLabelAuthentication & InformationAboutMe and later many more.
Projects:
- .Net SDK: I worked in a small agile team to create a .Net SDK based on core BT capabilities which was designed to be simple to use for external developers without knowledge of WS-* SOAP protocols
- Lead to Cash SDK: This project was developed to prototype an SDK to show how many generic BT capabilities could be created for a specific line of business and their customers within our framework
- MIS and Services Team: This team was created to build a system to analyse and report on usage and other bespoke statistics from multiple sources as required by the Web21C management team
Concept to Market Developer
BT
January 2006-June 2006
In this role I liaised with senior BT directors to bring new technologies from initial concept to the marketplace by prototyping software and demonstrating this to internal and external clients.
Projects:
- Microsoft Partnership: Created prototypes for an alliance between BT and Microsoft
- BlueStream Hot House: I helped organise this hot house for a collaboration between Conchango, BT and BlueCurve to create a new DRM platform based on BT and Microsoft technologies using scrum project management
- Microsoft Collaboration Hot House: I created prototypes to demonstrate how BT and Microsoft could work together to provide an integrated enterprise and home collaboration technologies
Senior Developer
PA News R&D
December 2003-January 2006
I was promoted to senior developer in recognition of my efforts in developing an array of bespoke web sites that covered a range of different forms of content. My role is to liaise with clients and guide technical design and development teams in the creation of branded web sites for our clients. The sites that I’ve developed or project led currently receive approximately 3,000,000 hits per week, so uptime, reliability and performance of software and hardware are my priorities.
Projects:
- Easy Cinema: This website is a combination of cinema listings, reviews and showbiz news that is personally used by Stelios himself. This site alone had hits of 500,000 pages and increasing just two weeks after launch!
- Betsettler: A private football results web site which practically all major betting companies globally have signed up to, so they can validate results for matches in every major football league
- MSN: TV, Gigs and Cinema websites for MSN UK. I designed the TV website, so that it uniquely displays TV listings in a clearly structured grid layout which is used by Yahoo!. The cinema and gigs sites now use a form of fuzzy logic, so that even incorrectly spelt events' names will result in accurate results
- Actim WAP: Actim is the brand name for data from the FA Premier league. This project was to create a branded mobile (WML/iMode/XHTML) site for premiership results and stats. The software dynamically adapts content to the phone viewing the site. It is now live on Telstra's Australian mobile portal
- Virgin.net: Developed World & UK news headlines sub portals as well as several sports latest stories sub portals (tennis / rugby union & league / football)
- T-Mobile: I was involved in a team effort to provide T-Mobile with the content to help them create an award winning Flash site for their latest mobile phones
- Other: Other projects I worked on during this time include Wanadoo (cinema search), NTL (cinema site), 118118.com (cinema search), BetOddOrEven (football results), BrandX Golf (sales site), BrandX Cricket (sales site) and many other company intranet sites
Software Developer
PA News R&D
March 2001-December 2003
I was promoted to a member of the research and development department, where I had to drop the technical support role I had as a programmer. My initial primary role was to help redevelop the digital teletext system, but I later moved to a lead role in the newly formed digital web team. Nearly all the sites I developed used a Perl backend to enter data into a MySQL database with PHP used to create each website.
Projects:
- BrandX Arts and Entertainment: Created a PHP web site running off a MySQL database that searches all the current Arts and Cinema listings across the UK and Ireland. If a user enters a town or postcode the results will show the distance to the venue by using Multimap geocoding technology
- Lastminute cinema search: Re-branded the above web site and defined it to search for cinema listings only. I also increased the accuracy of the results by allowing a user to search by an individual day rather than the usual film week (Friday to Thursday)
- AOL Wimbledon: The Wimbledon website for AOL was minimally designed, but even then resulted in millions of hits (mostly during the matches where Tim Henman was playing)
- Virgin.net: Developed 11 sub sites for the portal that include Weather, TV, Football, Theatre and Cinema sites
- Victor Chandler: Developed a football database in MySQL and a brandable web site to take advantage of the new database. The web site used the PHP/Smarty template engine to provide a Model-View-Controller structure to the site
- Digital Teletext: Worked on the digital teletext systems for the web and digital television platforms where we used MHEG to create and transmit pages live to their digital services
- Other: Other clients I developed sites for during this time include The Prince of Wales (official site), BetFred (football/horse racing), MyVillage (local events), Telegraph (events search) and The Times Online (cinema search)
Programmer
The Press Association (PA Listings)
October 1999-March 2001
I was primarily hired to move a legacy editorial application running on an equally legacy database to a modern Java application with a Perl backend running on a Informix database. The secondary aspect of my role was to provide full technical hardware/software support to the end users within the department. This gave me a clear understanding of how the average user uses and interacts with their computer and what they want from it.
Miscellany
What can't be captured on a résumé is my sheer
level of enthusiasm for not just programming,
but problem solving in general. I'm told I make nearly every
project run more smoothly because I know how to manage and make
people want to do their best.
Education
- 2nd class degree in Physics with Computing, October 1996-June 1999
University of Warwick - A-Level, September 1994-July 1996
Chadwell Heath School Sixth FormSubjects: Maths (B), Physics (C), Chemistry (D).
- GCSEs, September 1989-July 1994
Chadwell Heath High SchoolSubjects: 9 GCSE's including Maths, English, Science and Computer Science (all A to C).
Awards
- Best Agile Team, BT Agile Awards, 2007
This award was won for working as team member of the BT Web21C .Net SDK team
Interests
- Sports. I play Squash at least twice a week and most mornings I go swimming at my local pool. I'm also training to get fit enough to run the London Marathon in 2009 if accepted in the ballot
- Blogging and Social Networking. I'm a regular blogger on my thoughts on technology issues and I also attend anti conferences such as BarCamp
References
David Eastman Lead Developer, BT Web21C | |
Mark Pybus Business Manager, PA News R&D | |
Last modified March 2008.