Experience

Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute

• United Kingdom
• Research
• 100 - 200 Employee

• Senior Software Engineer

  • Aug 2018 - Present

  The role consists of s/w engineering and system administration. Quite a bit of Wordpress development (PHP, jQuery, CSS), including cloning and migrating a site and writing a bespoke Wordpress plugin to upload financial data to Stratocore invoice facility. Finished a project turning thousands of Excel spreadsheets (with incomplete/flawed data) into a MySQL database with a Wordpress front end (own plugin), with Python/Pandas back-end. I also maintain and tune the institute's external facing web presence (Apache 2.4). Designed and implementing a PDX (patient derived xenograft) database and web front end that ingests patient cancer data from hospitals and tracks its implanting and growth in mice. Legal niceties have to be observed rigorously. Show less



University of Cambridge

• United Kingdom
• Research Services
• 700 & Above Employee

• Research computing specialist

  • Jul 2011 - Jul 2018

  This role had many facets. I was responsible for all technical aspects of CamGrid, the university's high throughput computational grid; I lectured a C++ course open to all members of the University of Cambridge; I designed, commissioned and administered a number of Linux clusters + storage for various groups. I also undertook project work, some notable examples being:- Working on a mathematical epidemiology project involving a sizeable C++11 code base, as well as a developer on a similar open source project hosted on GitLab (project "infer").- Commission a number of XNAT/DICOM image repositories for Cancer Research UK. This includes the development of Python tools to automate data validation, ingestion and migration. Also involves Tomcat and PostgreSQL configuration and administration.- Worked with ARM/Calxeda based SoC platforms (http://www.eurocloudserver.com), mainly commissioning the h/w (DHCP, PXE booting, iSCSI h/d access, etc.), porting bioinformatics services and deploying a Ceph parallel file system (CephFS). Results presented at ISC 2013.- Developed a graphical workflow tool for HTCondor in wxPython (see https://sites.google.com/site/mycodeshed/home/pydag). Show less

• eScience Specialist

  • Oct 2004 - Jun 2011

  The main gist of this role was setting up and running the University's high-throughput campus grid, CamGrid, which uses HTCondor. I also undertook a number of software projects (mainly C++, Python and Javascript, with some Erlang), mostly under Linux. Quite a bit of virtualisation work (Xen & KVM under Linux), and utilising AWS EC2 resources (granted an academic award by Amazon), especially GPU HPC instances. Some notable projects were:- A pollution monitoring project where I was responsible for designing and implementing the communications, data distribution, storage and visualisation aspects (see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jun/25/cambridge-pollution-monitoring-mapping).- Installed, customised and administered an Ensembl database in a commercial cloud with secure web and API access (used X.509 certificates). This was done for a commercial partner, a well known pharmaceutical company. Show less

• Postdoctoral Research Fellow

  • Jan 2003 - Sep 2004

  This was part of the "large" eMinerals project, which as aimed at customising and deploying the then emerging grid technologies to the Earth Sciences academic community. My role was software and infrastructure based, mainly in commissioning, deploying and supporting various HTCondor, Globus and SRB (Storage Resource Broker) instances, which we weaved into a grid. Lots of Perl glue was required, and performance tuning.

• Postdoctoral Research Fellow

  • Jan 2000 - Dec 2002

  Studied twinned mineral structures via atomistic simulations (using DLPOLY and own C++ Monte-Carlo simulation package) and Landau theory. The role required the development of copious analysis and visualisation software, using C++ and Perl.



Roke

• United Kingdom
• IT Services and IT Consulting
• 400 - 500 Employee

• Senior Software Engineer

  • 1996 - 1999

  More C and C++ work, and cut my teeth on Perl. Projects worked on included an air traffic project (designed and wrote a network simulator for a European client - C++ under Unix) as well as working on Siemens' then latest generation routers (C under VxWorks). More C and C++ work, and cut my teeth on Perl. Projects worked on included an air traffic project (designed and wrote a network simulator for a European client - C++ under Unix) as well as working on Siemens' then latest generation routers (C under VxWorks).



University of Kent

• United Kingdom
• Higher Education
• 700 & Above Employee

• Postdoctoral researcher

  • 1992 - 1996

  Theoretical and computational study of liquids. Theory used density functional methods, while the computation involved C/C++ for serial jobs and Occam 2 for parallel (transputer) work. Lectured a C programming course. Theoretical and computational study of liquids. Theory used density functional methods, while the computation involved C/C++ for serial jobs and Occam 2 for parallel (transputer) work. Lectured a C programming course.