Senior Software Engineer

• Mar 2023 - Present

Senior Go Engineer

• Apr 2020 - Jun 2021

* Splitting out a legacy VB .Net monolithic app into Golang microservices* SQL Server 2008, MS SQL Server Management Studio, in-house golang database access library* HTTP web api* TCP api* Unit, integration and e2e testing using go testing, httptest libs* Go documentation, example tests, etc.* Profiling with pprof lib* Metrics using expvar* Kafka messaging, Segmentio/kafka-go library* Goland IDE, MS Visual Studio Code* peer reviews and mentoring new starters* Jira, sprints, design, estimation Show less

Contract PHP Developer

• Nov 2019 - Apr 2020

Worked on a global ecommerce platform for a well-known brand of Optician stores. Main application was Drupal 7 with embedded Angular applications. I worked on launch of glasses ecommerce capability for Netherlands, UK, and Sweden.

Contract PHP Developer

• Nov 2017 - Oct 2019

Worked on a variety of backend PHP/Oracle SQL projects around an internal customer management system, automated customer communications systems, and other applications. Many of the projects I worked on had fixed deadlines due to FSA regulatory requirements. Core codebase was large-scale and legacy, with new greenfield project work allowing migration towards a more service oriented system. Worked on a variety of backend PHP/Oracle SQL projects around an internal customer management system, automated customer communications systems, and other applications. Many of the projects I worked on had fixed deadlines due to FSA regulatory requirements. Core codebase was large-scale and legacy, with new greenfield project work allowing migration towards a more service oriented system.

PHP Developer

• Oct 2017 - Nov 2017

Senior Software Engineer

• Sep 2012 - Aug 2017

As the senior engineer in my team, I had a wide range of responsibilities around project planning, writing high level designs, building and sizing user stories and technical tasks, managing sprint work, developing new code modules, working with legacy code, writing tests, and ensuring work was done to plan. I spent time alongside more junior members of the team, mentoring, pair programming, problem solving, investigating and introducing them to new concepts. My code development is fully TDD, using clean code and refactoring to build functional and easy to use components. A lot of my time was spent working in legacy code with all the problems that raises when getting code into a testing harness and refactoring to modern engineering best practice. I worked across the department on projects to help make everyone's code more robust, reliable and better engineered to modern coding standards. As a team we operated using Agile/XP methodologies such as using user stories, 3 week sprints (with planning meetings, reviews, retrospectives, and backlog reviews), being one team, and generally being responsive and flexible in our approach. I was a champion of Clean Code and PHP, and I started up and led the PHP Guild and Clean Code Club at Plusnet. Show less

PHP Developer and Big Data Analyst

• Apr 2011 - Sep 2012

I was responsible for a global analytics reporting system. This large-scale MySQL data warehousing system handled tens of millions of new data per day. A PHP framework cleansed and aggregated data ready for querying through a bespoke web-based Management Information Tool. Aggregate data was exposed through charts and summary tables, with the ability to drill-down for more specific analysis. Bespoke data mining queries required hand-crafted MySQL queries over large datasets and the presentation of results through Excel charting. Legacy code was entirely procedural PHP4, much of which I successfully refactored as OOP into the Zend MVC Framework, and covered with unit tests (PHPUnit) and integration tests (Behat). An entirely new system was developed based on the Amazon AWS framework. Incoming data was collected through Flume and stored in S3 buckets. Elastic MapReduce was used to analyse big data sets, and aggregate data was stored in an Amazon RDS database. Aggregated data was scooped out of RDS and into a bitnami MySQL database on top of which sat the Analytics tool using Highchart JS libraries to display charts and tables. Nightly and hourly PHP scripts queried the data by passing HiveQL queries to EMR through a thrift interface. Show less

PHP Web developer

• Jan 2009 - Apr 2011

My role involved a wide mixture of client work, from installation and skinning of basic Wordpress sites, to bespoke development of e-commerce sites. Object oriented PHP coding is my passion, working mainly with MySQL databases on both Windows and Linux servers. Frontend development involved me in slicing up designs in Photoshop and building sites using standards compliant and accessible XHTML/CSS, and javascript/ajax functionality (using Mootools and jQuery libraries mainly). I also worked with Zend Framework and the Magento e-commerce platform. Show less

Sharepoint developer (fixed-term contract)

• Nov 2008 - Dec 2008

Development of staff intranet based on MS Sharepoint. Development of staff intranet based on MS Sharepoint.