International Politics and Strategic Studies|University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Interests
Gardening
Beekeeping
Birdwatching
Woodworking
Profile
An engineer with a wealth of experience in technical leadership, the software development life cycle and implementing a DevOps culture in an existing team. With over 15 years of experience building highly scalable software, I can quickly grasp even the most-poorly documented software and communicate solutions to appropriate stakeholders. I am experienced in mentoring junior team members, building up their confidence and skills and providing technical direction to the whole team.
A tool for automatically ingesting data sets into your development stack
Designed a service for the age-old problem of needing to ingest known data sets into development stack.
Can run as a web service as well as a CLI, the web service being able to be automatically executed prior to each integration test being run. This isolates the tests and data to help guarantee atomic tests.
Only interested in data ingestion rather than the table migration. This enables it to work with cross-platform ORMs out-of-the-box.
A testing tool that records all website events for replaying at a later date with a simple, two-line installation that works cross-platform.
Designed a scalable microservice architecture that is able to work with third-party APIs
for authentication and issue tracking. The API is flexible enough to implement additional
third-party services at a later date by creation of an appropriate strategy. The service records
large amounts of binary data so made use of cloud data buckets for optimal read/write capability.
Established a DevOps workflow using Kubernetes with feature-branch deployments. Configured
a full CI/CD suite, made a series of reusable CI functions to ensure terse configuration files.
Maintained a separation between processes that needed to be real-time and ones that could be
batch-processed later to reduce costs.
Developed a recorder that is installed and configured in the user's browser that intercepts
the relevant global DOM objects and pushes the events to a message queue for later processing into
a playable timeline. Established metrics with automated tests to ensure that these adhere to
appropriate performance criteria.
Built a playback service that processed the events into the correct order with all relevant
bucket data pre-loaded. Implemented an iterator pattern to load the data in segments to give a
smooth playback experience.
Led the development of an Internal Developer Platform for a hybrid cloud/on-prem platform. This platform had several complexities, including global replication of terabytes of data and the use of both Linux and Windows nodes in the cluster. As a defence contractor, the security of this platform was a critical aspect. With the amount of data involved, speed and cost management were crucial metrics.
Provided technical leadership to the Platform team. Engaged with key stakeholders across the organisation to achieve adoption of the Internal Developer Platform. Created a team roadmap to develop new platform capabilities requested by the engineering community.
Established a DevX Working Group with key influencers from the engineering community. An Internal Developer Platform was a new concept to the organisation, so there was much uncertainty about the value that could be provided.
Developed relationships with external vendors that resulted in greater value from the products. Through regular calls, I was able to get new features prioritised. By committing to a multi-year contract with our long-term vendors, I achieved a 33% discount.
Worked with my team to build personal goals and provided mentoring and help so that they could achieve them.
Worked to upgrade the company to use modern development tooling, such as migrating from Subversion to Git, adoption of GitOps and continuous delivery.
Amazon Web ServicesAzureDeveloper ExperienceDeveloper RelationsDockerGoGoogle Cloud PlatformHelmKubernetesMentoringRemote DevelopmentReplicatedSelf-HostedTechnical LeadershipTypeScript
Provided the technical leadership for the self-hosted product, working with users to successfully manage over 1,000 installations in the wild
Designed and built the Gitpod Installer. This replaced some very unwieldy Helm chartsto simplify the installation experience for both Gitpod and self-hosted users alike. This was a very successful endeavour and launched Gitpod self-hosted into a mainstream product.
Extended the Gitpod Installer by using Replicated's Kubernetes-Off-The-Shelf (KOTS) to provide a one-click install of Gitpod. This required extensive work with Replicated engineers to extend their product so it would work with the Gitpod Installer.
Worked with external users to understand their needs for the self-hosted product. This involved developing relationships with key stakeholders at enterprise customers and engaging with the Gitpod community.
Mentored engineers in my team. This mostly involved unlocking their self-confidence and using my experience to help them solve problems. I was fortunate enough to work with some brilliant humans and was, without doubt, the most exciting part of my role.
Wrote, submitted and delivered talks for various international conferences including KubeCon North America and Cloud Native Rejekts EU.
Provided DevOps leadership and consultancy services to help Foundry4 clients level-up their DevOps capability
Worked with significant clients, including Ofgem, the British Red Cross and HM Planning Inspectorate, on a wide range of projects. The key arbiter of success was the ability to keep ahead of current trends in DevOps and being able to explain these to technical and business stakeholders.
Worked across a range of technologies and patterns, dependent upon the client's skill set and experience. The role was split between architecture and planning, hands-on technical and stakeholder management.
Provided technical leadership, both amongst the Foundry4 team and client team, running structured and ad-hoc training sessions. These were focused on the new patterns and workflows being implemented as part of the programme the consultancy was engaged in delivering but often covered additional topics as necessary.
Kubernetes and GitOps was a regular feature of the work delivered but included many different features of the cloud providers used. There was a strong focus on automation, self-service, reliability and monitoring.
Inherited an undocumented codebase from a third-party, including an unsupported
proprietary graph database and worked to achieve a stable platform to provide domestic heating for
trials involving 30 and 100 homes.
Working within tight constraints I developed key components for the system that would
ensure a standard of reliability to safeguard all users, particularly those vulnerable to
downtime.
Developed strong working relationships with key members of different teams to fully
understand real-world issues with the applications and established proposals to address them.
Worked with the data science team to provide an additional software resource especially
with R, Spark and Cassandra, technologies I was previously unfamiliar with.
Took responsibilities as interim scrum master when the need arose and managed interactions
with third-party development partners.
Encouraged use of best practice, especially amongst junior developers mentored.
Led the NodeJS development team on a replacement API for the main website, which
had to maintain backwards compatibility with the existing website.
Established weekly workshops to educate the team on best practice in NodeJS and MongoDB.
Managed the sprints and the whole agile process. The teams were spread across three
different locations and, initially, the communication was poor. Improved this by tightening the
agile disciplines.
Encouraged the adoption of Microservices for admin processes. Proposed an architectural
design for this solution and implemented it.
Brought in to provide Angular and D3 expertise. As a pure Java house, they had
limited knowledge of front-end JavaScript. Improved their usage to provide a more consistent and an
easier development experience.
Rewrote the front-end for their main Lean Client product. Although marketed as a single
application, in reality it was a suite of software. Configured this to build to a Docker image
Created a Yeoman generator for fast construction of new AngularJS modules. This was partly
to enforce consistency, but to help the Java engineers gain familiarity in JavaScript.
Developed a comprehensive form generator to enable the API to generate a schema that would
display the user input in a consistent way.
Provided training to the Java engineers on how to use JavaScript, Angular and their
associated ecosystems and how to develop and deploy with the module framework I developed.
Developed both front and back-end components as part of a team that created an
automated pension advice system.
Collaborated to design and implement a Data Definition Language for the PHP back-end to
publish a comprehensive question schema. This schema would be ingested by the Angular front-end to
dynamically generate the form, which could be defined on a per-broker basis.
Built a series of reusable Angular components to be used across the platform.
Developed a PDF report generator for the broker's advice to be displayed with D3
infographics. Worked closely with the firm's pension advisers to ensure accurate and FCA compliant
reports.
Worked on the main DPD/Interlink RESTful API. Written in pure NodeJS, this
business-critical service was responsible for handling requests for web users, depot operations and
receiving batch data from senders.
Implemented continuous integration principles to the development workflow. Due to the
company being a round-the-clock operation, worked with the SysOps team to reduce the time required
for software upgrades.
Principal engineer on the industry-leading Follow My Parcel service, which included being
part of the team that designed the architecture. The primary problem was that the current system was
not designed for real-time tracking as the central database was monolithic and unscalable. The
design and implementation needed to encompass methods of achieving live updates without huge expense
or causing service outage. This was the flagship project that year and a major USP for the company,
whilst handling a large increase in daily requests - ~700,000 and ~900,000 on Xbox One and PS4
launch days respectively.
Wrote a pure JavaScript driver for the Rocket UniVerse NoSQL database. As UniVerse is a
proprietary piece of software with little public documentation available, this required reverse
engineering the Java driver and translating into NodeJS. As a fundamental piece of the live tracking
architecture, this reliably handles millions of requests per day.
Ran training sessions to upskill non-JS developers to be proficient in the NodeJS
platform.
Built the alpha-release of the BugFinders project, featuring complexities such as a
streaming video server, internationalization and responsive mobile site.
Also responsible for managing the development team, liaising with external suppliers and
helping develop the business proposition.
The main development was in PHP/MySQL, however there was a great deal of time spent
learning new technologies (such as OAuth, Java and Python) and learning testing methodologies.
Lead development of the new British Pathé website, featuring over 90,000 videos and a
large database schema.
As well has being involved with the planning and building of the project, I learnt how to
use Apache Solr which, at the time, was largely undocumented and entirely unused in a PHP
environment.
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Platform Programmer (contract)|Red Procurement
DoctrineMS-SQLMySQLPHPSolutions Design
Designed and built Streamline, a purpose-built tool to aid procurement managers track their
workflow and costs and for directors to see company-wide trends.
Due to the sensitive nature of the data generated, one requirement was for this project was
for it to be deployable on both Windows and Linux servers, connecting to MySQL or MS-SQL databases.
Using Doctrine ORM to abstract the data stores and heavy use of unit testing to ensure consistency
achieved this.
Fire-fighting role doing emergency updates on the business-critical Loanfinder.co.uk
website.
For longer-term stability, implemented various structural improvements to the development
team. These included a full version control, a standardised development environment, test-driven
development and formal programming standards.