United Kingdom
After starting my career in Electrical Engineering as a Hardware design engineer for aerospace and medical instrument companies I decided that I was enjoying coding on my side project enough that I wanted to do it full time. My self assigned curriculum never seems to shrink, there are always more interesting projects, libraries, languages, and patterns to investigate and learn from.
I was asked to take over ownership of a shared API Gateway service, maintain and improve this while fulfilling BAU additional requirements. I re-worked the local development to more closely resmeble the staging & production dev / deploy experience reducing the possibility of small time consuming bugs which would arise from dev-prod parity differences.
Yoto’s platform has a server-less architecture running in AWS, with 100,000 IoT devices and a similar number of MAU. As part of the platform team my role was to maintain and improve the system which allowed all clients (apps, hardware, internal systems) to operate. Yoto’s ecosystem is a highly dynamic customer facing system where failures can occur at the hardware, the firmware, software or the platform. Diving in at the deep end, my first major contribution was introducing a provenience & audit-log system for purchased content within the platform. Later i was the lead in a cross team project to update the Subscription offering for Yoto, bringing improvements to production which required Web, Backend, ERP/ Logistics and marketing involvement. Along side these major pieces of work, i would spend time on front line customer service support, running down tricky bugs, maintaining internal tooling, and helping to design & architect for the company strategic goals.
Units of Sound was original developed in the early 90’s by my father in Toolbook, over this time Units of Sound has become the UK leading Literacy teaching tool, deployed in 700+ schools around the UK. In 2009 the project decided to redevelop UofS for the Web. With no deadlines for the move, and with spare time myself it was a obvious decision to become involved. Today I spend abut 10 hours a week outside my full time role, working as part of a six person remote team, (Designer, Developer (me) Graphic Designer, Product manager, QA team and Operational support) to support and develop UofS. I have had the chance to shape not only the code of the application itself, but also the whole development infrastructure (Continual Integration, Continual Deployment, Testing), customer support, infrastructure monitoring, and most major technology choices.
Zeavo entered into a partnership with Money Plus Group with the intention of significantly increasing the capability of the existing Zeavo’s SaaS offering, DebtKit, so that MPG could replace their own internal legacy systems with DebtKit. To make this possible myself and two other developers were brought on board to expand the existing Node API back-end and introduce a completely new front end solution. The Scope of improvements contained, Document management, change control & approvals, version control, User defined automation’s. And recently we have ben helping to coach the existing MPG developer though a re-design & re-implementation of a custom accounting solution that will be delivered as a plugin to the overall DebtKit system.