Berlin, Berlin, Germany
I have 30 years experience as a software developer and software architect - leading teams that build flexible, web-scale applications that can support 10,000s of users. I love inspiring the brilliant people I work with to build the tools of the future! Getting my hands dirty doesn't scare me - whether infrastructure, CI/CD or code.
Since I became CTO, I decided to redesign our legacy product infrastructure to improve scalability and reliability. The new cloud based innovation solution continues to advance, and I remain actively involved in the architecture of this new generation of innovation management tool. Simultaneously, I am supervising a team of 7 DevOps engineers across 4 locations who provide internal and external technical support. I am also a key part of the senior management decision making process, reporting to the board and helping to close deals with leading global companies.
Defined an engineering strategy and goal for the company and shared a concept for a next generation innovation tool with senior management. Aligned with the key stakeholders to create and refine the features and architecture over the coming years, while working closely with the senior developers to realise that vision. Responsible for the design and implementation of the infrastructure required to support the application, including ensuring the infrastructure was secure and cost optimized.
When I first joined Cezanne, I supported and developed an existing legacy organizational charting tool, HR Charter. This product was written in C++ over several years and was challenging to support and extend. Despite that, the team I managed released a major update and several customer projects. Eventually a decision was made to sell the legacy products, including HR Charter, to focus on a brand new HR Management solution in the cloud, Cezanne On Demand. When this change happened I was invited to join the new team and became involved in the design and implementation of many key components, including the organizational charting control. The product has an n-tier architecture, with a SQL Server back end and C# middle-ware. The early versions of the front end were written in Silverlight, but two years ago we started a project to migrate to an HTML5 client written in Typescript against the Angular JavaScript framework. This project has been completed and the Silverlight client is being phased out.
My role at Appian involved building bespoke applications based on the core number plate recognition software. These projects varied from software for cameras installed in police cars to car park management software that allowed car parks to calculate the length of time a car spent in the car park without issuing a paper ticket. Development was done in Visual C++ and Visual Basic 6.0.
AIT Software (now part of Pitney Bowes) developed customer relationship management systems for banks that provided call centre agents with a consistent user interface to access customer's data across a wide range of back end systems. I was involved in several customer projects, notably one which integrated with a well known UK fraud identification service. Development was done in C++ with an Oracle database. Unfortunately I was made redundant when the company ran into financial difficulties.