Richard Longden-Thurgood
Principal Software Engineer at Bazaruto- Claim this Profile
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Bio
Shane Parker
During my time under Richard's management, I witnessed significant growth in my technical abilities. Richard always demonstrated a willingness to lend a hand when it came to Ruby-related queries and was highly empathetic when it came to addressing employee health matters. Richard's leadership qualities were remarkable, and any team would be fortunate to have him. Even today, Richard and I continue to maintain a strong friendship and I would eagerly embrace any opportunity to work with him again if the planets were to align that way.
Neil Shelly
If ever you get the chance hire him! Rich is highly knowledgeable, thoughtful, switched on, pragmatic, efficient and flexible. The end result of his efforts is fit-for-purpose, high quality software, produced quickly - every time. I had the pleasure to work with him over many years and have been nothing but impressed.
Shane Parker
During my time under Richard's management, I witnessed significant growth in my technical abilities. Richard always demonstrated a willingness to lend a hand when it came to Ruby-related queries and was highly empathetic when it came to addressing employee health matters. Richard's leadership qualities were remarkable, and any team would be fortunate to have him. Even today, Richard and I continue to maintain a strong friendship and I would eagerly embrace any opportunity to work with him again if the planets were to align that way.
Neil Shelly
If ever you get the chance hire him! Rich is highly knowledgeable, thoughtful, switched on, pragmatic, efficient and flexible. The end result of his efforts is fit-for-purpose, high quality software, produced quickly - every time. I had the pleasure to work with him over many years and have been nothing but impressed.
Shane Parker
During my time under Richard's management, I witnessed significant growth in my technical abilities. Richard always demonstrated a willingness to lend a hand when it came to Ruby-related queries and was highly empathetic when it came to addressing employee health matters. Richard's leadership qualities were remarkable, and any team would be fortunate to have him. Even today, Richard and I continue to maintain a strong friendship and I would eagerly embrace any opportunity to work with him again if the planets were to align that way.
Neil Shelly
If ever you get the chance hire him! Rich is highly knowledgeable, thoughtful, switched on, pragmatic, efficient and flexible. The end result of his efforts is fit-for-purpose, high quality software, produced quickly - every time. I had the pleasure to work with him over many years and have been nothing but impressed.
Shane Parker
During my time under Richard's management, I witnessed significant growth in my technical abilities. Richard always demonstrated a willingness to lend a hand when it came to Ruby-related queries and was highly empathetic when it came to addressing employee health matters. Richard's leadership qualities were remarkable, and any team would be fortunate to have him. Even today, Richard and I continue to maintain a strong friendship and I would eagerly embrace any opportunity to work with him again if the planets were to align that way.
Neil Shelly
If ever you get the chance hire him! Rich is highly knowledgeable, thoughtful, switched on, pragmatic, efficient and flexible. The end result of his efforts is fit-for-purpose, high quality software, produced quickly - every time. I had the pleasure to work with him over many years and have been nothing but impressed.
Credentials
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Introduction to TensorFlow for Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning
CourseraMay, 2023- Oct, 2024
Experience
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Bazaruto
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South Africa
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IT Services and IT Consulting
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1 - 100 Employee
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Principal Software Engineer
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Aug 2023 - Present
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ChainAPI
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Blockchain Services
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1 - 100 Employee
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Technical Manager
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May 2022 - Feb 2023
- Delivery: Created the team proposal and ensured execution thereon - project management, board management, task breakdown, compiling weekly progress reports on ongoing projects, and negotiating priorities with up- and downstream teams - Team management: One on ones, performance reviews, hosted retrospectives and actioned outcomes - Process: Migrated the team from Scrum to Kanban to improve delivery turnaround, measured with appropriate metrics monitoring - DevOps: developed one-click deployment workflows with automated release notes, optimised development builds, added a lightweight PR template to improve the team conversations and PR turnaround times, performed PR reviews for team SQL queries and data migrations, involved and hosted solution discussions with the engineers - Recruitment: compiled job descriptions, reviewed CVs, performed interviews and negotiated contracts - Metrics: created a system metrics dashboard to monitor usage and creating and monitoring engineering metrics with automation - Budgeting: Compiled and tracked the team budget, cost monitoring of services and migrations where necessary, and interacting with suppliers on costs - Disaster Recovery: added monitoring with alerts to all systems, created automated offsite backups of databases, performed disaster recovery checks - Support: providing first-line support to clients, set up the support process and related tracking - Technical Writing: contributing to the public documentation Show less
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Bazaruto
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South Africa
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IT Services and IT Consulting
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1 - 100 Employee
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Principal Software Engineer
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Jan 2018 - Dec 2021
Bazaruto was launched as a separate entity from Go2Africa in early 2018. Many of my responsibilities carried over, but in addition: - Shifted to primarily a back-end focus on Ruby and Ruby on Rails design, architecture and engineering - Product owner and delivery lead for Content Operations systems: product data, rates, master data and API integrations - Line management for junior and intermediate developers: developed career paths to aid in career development and retention, and established performance review procedures - Part of the management group, including delivery on OKRs - Compiled and tracked engineering metrics - Researched and lead workshops on restructuring Engineering and its processes to optimise team performance - Go to team member for complex data migrations Show less
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Go2Africa
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South Africa
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Travel Arrangements
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1 - 100 Employee
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Senior Software Engineer
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Feb 2014 - Dec 2017
I was invited to join Go2Africa to form part of the initial team to deliver the Bazaruto platform. Responsibilities included: - Full stack engineering, with more focus on the back-end, but primarily Ruby, Ruby on Rails, React & Redux - Largely responsible for API integration, rates and pricing calculations, accounting exports, payment provider integration, the search index, as well as general infrastructure and architecture - Involved in and lead both business and technical requirements discussions - Researched and implemented the team's Kanban process - Code reviews, knowledge sharing and leading team retrospectives - Set up and management of the infrastructure for continuous delivery - Tech stack upgrades (Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Postgres & Elasticsearch) Show less
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Saratoga Software
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South Africa
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Software Development
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1 - 100 Employee
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Senior Software Engineer
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Nov 2011 - Jan 2014
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Web Molecule
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South Africa
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IT Services and IT Consulting
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1 - 100 Employee
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Software Engineer
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Mar 2011 - Oct 2011
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BSG
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South Africa
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IT Services and IT Consulting
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300 - 400 Employee
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Software Engineer
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Feb 2008 - Nov 2010
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Education
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2004 - 2007
University of Cape Town
Bachelor of Business Science (Hons), Information Systems
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