Employment History:
Domestic & General | 01/2016 - Present | Senior Developer
Domestic & General are the UK's leading provider of appliance breakdown protection, supplying over 8 million people with insurance cover for a wide range of home appliances and electronic devices.
Role Overview: Working in a team of developers primarily responsible for the creation and maintenance of desktop software applications to facilate the day-to-day running of a call centre and the wider business. Involved in all areas of the software development lifecycle: requirements gathering, design, implementation, and delivery. Responsible for, alongside other senior members of the team, support and mentoring of more junior team members.
Notable Projects:
- 3rd-party Audit API: A RESTful webservice designed to allow 3rd-party business partners to submit QA call audits to D&G. The soution is hosted in AWS and both infrastructre and codebase deployed automatically via GitHub actions and CloudFormation templates generated by AWS CDK.
- D&G Coaching: A bespoke WPF desktop application designed to standardise how agents' coaching is scheduled, administered, and reported on across the UK's call centres.
- Application Launcher: a WPF desktop application used as a portal for opening any application in the department's application suite. Has cascading permissions functionality (site/department/role/user account) as well as the factility to offer multiple version of the same application to a user, e.g. UAT, Pilot, and Production.
- D&G User Management: Inherited and refactored a Windows Form application used for the creation and maintenance of disparate accounts across the business - Active Directory + D&G propriatary systems. Used to enable/disable accounts as well as update roles and permission sets.
- International Quality Assurance: a WPF desktop application used by D&G's international Quality Assurance departments to record and report on the auditing of calls for quality and compliance with regulations.
- Whirlpool Repair Portal: an MVC5 project used to validate a D&G customer's policy before co-ordinating with Whirlpool's SOAP web services to book engineers for appliance repairs.
Friday Media Group | 06/2014 - 12/2015 | Lead Developer
Friday Media Group run a number of the UK's largest general and specialist classified advertising platforms as well as publishing the weekly paper the Friday-Ad.
Role Overview: Lead Developer in a distrubuted development team. Responsible for the software architecture of new projects as well the distribution and prioritsation of work among the team. Providing ongoing support and training for junior members of the team.
Notable Projects:
- Contact Moderation: an application tasked with providing safe and anonymous communications between users of our websites. It intercepts and moderates emails sent to domains we control, moderates the message content and, if accepted, either delivers the email or notifies the associated website via a webhook.
- Advert Moderation: an application designed to identify fake, scam and illegal adverts, advertisers, and buyers across our classified advertising platforms. The system was designed to be agnostic of the calling applications while still providing rich customisation optionss. It replaced five legacy systems which were performing the task previously.
Friday Media Group | 09/2012 - 06/2015 | Senior Developer
Role Overview: Worked in a small team of developers for a company whose primary business was classified advertising. I was involved in the design, creation, and maintenace of the back-end system responsible for facilitating the syndication and distribution of adverts around its digital estate.
Notable Projects:
- Feed Aggregation: an application stack responsible for the aggregation of disparate customer feeds in order to present them to a range of websites running on a number of platforms. This applications consists of a number of Windows services talking to message queues and offering the results of parsed feeds via a JSON-presenting WebApi project - all of which is administered by an MVC4 website. All advert data is stored in a MongoDB database.
- Advert Syndication: a centralised advert distribution service designed to be consuming platform agnostic, reliant on tag-based routing.
- Various Websites: maintaining and updating a number of classified advertising websites.
tlmNEXUS | 11/2005 - 09/2012 | Web Developer
tlmNEXUS specialise in providing through-life management software for military aircraft. They work closely with the IPTs for Eurofigher Typhoon and Boeing Chinook.
Role Overview: Worked as part of a development team, consisting of about twenty-or-so developers, tasked with creating and maintaing through-life management systems for Ministry of Defense aircraft and helicopters. The applications were web-based and intially utilised Microsoft's WebForms framework with an MVP architecture, but were later migrated over to use the MVC framework.
Notable Projects:
- Ministry of Defense (MoD): I was part of a team which developed and maintained a number of through-life management applications for aircraft. I was involved in introducing the MVP architecture model so that test-driven development could be better facilitated on the most recent of these applications.
- H. Tempest: Responsible for extending, redesigning, refactoring, and developing new and existing areas of the Tempest Lab software - an application responsible for the day-to-day running of a photo development laboratory.
- The Compact: Implemented a bespoke intranet system responsible for customer relationship and document management. I used a combination of the .NetTiers templates, for generating an n-tiered architectures, along with .NET membership components and functionality.
- The Parenting Academy: Involved in developing a generic questionnaire ASP.NET server control initially to used for this project but which could be easily utilised in other projects.
IBUK Web Services | 09/2004 - 11/2005 | Junior Web Developer
Role Overview: Junior member of a small development team using VBScript within the classic ASP framework to create and maintain travel websites for clients.
Notable Projects:
- Chilli Nights: Responsible for the design and implementation of the back-end administration console via which the client controlled their site. This involved the creation of an HTML and ASP (VBScript) GUI which interacted with a MySQL database.
- Snow Hounds: On this project I designed and implemented the database structure as well as translating the paper prototype designs into an HTML template. I was also responsible for the all the functionality behind customer interactions with the site.
- Hove Lagoon: I was responsible for most aspects of the design and functionality of this site. I also created the administration back-end which, among other tasks, generated XML files for a Flash weather-board to read.