Derby, England, United Kingdom
I fell in love with coding when I was fourteen years old. Even after over a decade in commercial software, in my heart nothing has changed. The abstract world of software provides an opportunity to rise-above the compromises of the material world. This means perfection is possible. Technically minded, my early career showed me that technical excellence is not enough for real world success. An attitude of service and empathy with my stakeholders is the path to achieving the goals technology aims to achieve. Technology is an expensive investment in future efficiency, so every end product represents the value of my profession as a whole. As I excelled in the private sector, I learned to understand the balance of concerns between software quality, the speed of delivery and the cost of the project as a whole. I graduated to development management, reporting to non-technical directors. There I discovered which working practices provide real value, and those that represented a wider software culture promoting gimmicks and third-party interests. Now signing-off payment orders and hiring staff, I learned to ask the question, “what if this was my money?” As a consultant, I now pride myself on knowing software from soup to nuts. Soft skills to hard cash. Whiteboard to blue-green deployment. Personal integrity to organisational results. Between engagements, I busy myself with continuous study and certification. As well as my coding expertise, I pride myself on having strong people skills, project management understanding, and software deployment experience. When I’m not coding or studying. I’m an avid reader, enjoying books on philosophy, history, anthropology, and Shakespeare’s plays. I also enjoy volunteering for the Samaritans year-round, and at my local foodbank during the winter season. Recently I’ve been practicing my Chess, though I’ve still a lot to learn!
• I joined an agile development team, working on an in-flight SDLC project for central government. • I was brought in to increase code delivery speed to meet existing deadlines. • My development tasks and technologies varied widely, from web pages to webservice endpoints, client-side script, and database changes. • The web application was written in .Net MVC 5, using vanilla JavaScript and jQuery for client-side scripting, with CSS and Bootstrap for layout. • Web APIs were REST compliant .Net Core 3 Web APIs, often called using AJAX. • Data persistence provided by MySQL (direct SQL using Dapper & AutoMapper), this included aggregating/report-style queries in addition to standard CRUD operations. • Testing undertaken by a dedicated tester within the team, then verified by the end client’s user acceptance team at pre-agreed waypoints. • Frequently working six-day weeks and most bank holidays, the team made some excellent progress and hit all deadlines. • As the project moved from the bulk development phase to a fit-and-finish phase, and looking to take a break, I concluded the engagement.
• I joined an in-progress feature driven development team, within a scaled agile framework (SAFe 5) release train, back-filling in the team during high turnover and statutory leave within the permanent team. • Product features predominantly revolved around immutable deliverables related to legal requirements (gambling industry).I delivered User Stories as a .Net & React polyglot, with around 40% of my time spent on Web API, 60% of my time on React. • The public site used React (Hooks) with Redux, Axios, Styled components, Flexbox. Unit test using Cypress. • The APIs were .Net Core 3 Web API, deployed in Docker containers on Google Cloud Platform (Kubernetes). • Data persistence provided by MySQL (direct SQL using Dapper), Google Cloud Platform Queues (Pub/Sub) for inter service communication. • Unit testing using xUnit, Moq and Faker. SpecFlow was used for BDD tests. • As well as contributing to architecture discussions and augmenting the testing team, I was also involved in making minor changes in GoLang and PHP. • With the permanent development resource back to full strength, the engagement was concluded with a successful handover.
• I joined an in-progress short-running project rearchitecting a microservices broker platform for a financial institution. • The main goal being broad latency and code complexity reduction, though also involving refactoring in-depth a key “nexus point” service. • In addition to this we were adding unit test coverage and switching to .Net Core Dependency Injection. • Existing .Net Core 2 Microservices required migrating to .Net Core 5. • Data persistence provided by Postgres (Entity Framework (EF) Core 5) and MongoDB. With RabbitMq for inter-service communication. • I wrote unit tests using NUnit, Moq, FluentAssertions and AutoFixture, with SqlLite and the in-memory provider used for Entity Framework (EF) Core abstraction. • I also assisted the performance testing team and produced management artefacts (service maps, performance test results) and presented results at project reviews.
• I joined a greenfield project team consisting of UX, Api and Test developers. • The project was to launch a new credit score monitoring tool, aimed at high-net-worth subscribers. • Application used a microservice architecture for scalability. Deployed within Docker containers on AWS. • Working from User Stories, I built Api Microservices in .Net Core Web API. • The solution used a mixture of NoSql, SQL and Message Queue cloud data stores provided by AWS. • Using a TDD approach, individual services were tested with XUnit and FluentAssertions. • In addition to development, I also joined the test developers for multiple sprints, writing BDD tests in Cucumber and Gherkin (Java 8).