Personal Details

Personal Profile

I am a senior developer with additional skills as a team/technical lead and technical and software architecture. My core interests involving designing and developing Enterprise Java (j2ee), Corba and XML solutions and their role in enterprise application integration (eai).

I have been a senior developer, technical architect, technical lead and/or team leader on a number of projects, and have a total of over 6 years experience in the IT industry.

I am looking to be a senior developer in a small or medium company, with additional responsibilities in software design. I wish to remain in ‘hands-on’ development whilst facing new business and technical challenges, broadening my knowledge across new areas of industry and technology.

Outside of work I enjoy rowing, Scuba diving, snowboarding and cycling.

Education

Occupational Qualifications

I am currently studying for the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for j2ee qualification.

Skill Summary

Technical Skills

Employment History

Employer: MWS Consulting Ltd Cambridge, England.

Duration:   Ongoing, Jan 2001—

MWS Consulting is a software consultancy. I am responsible for the technical direction of the company and all client-facing contact. I have completed projects for the following clients—

Client:      Fleetwood Electronics Ltd, Cambridge, England

Project:    Mobile Network Terminal, Feb 2003—

Role:         Senior Developer

Fleetwood Electronics provide a mobile networking and messaging solution to companies that manage fleets of vehicles. The mobile device runs Java on Linux and the central communications hub runs Java on NT. The device/server communications can be http, sms or gprs.

My responsibilities include:

·         Designing and developing Java applications that run on the mobile device

·         Evaluating and developing communications protocols between devices and server

·         Designing and developing Java servlets for http communications 

Client:      Video Networks Ltd, Stevenage, England

Project:    Core Separation Project, Mar 2002—Feb 2003

Role:         Senior Developer, Technical Lead, Technical and Software Architect

Video Networks Ltd (Vnl) wished to retain my skills (as demonstrated on the crm integration project described below) to analyse all their IT systems and define an architecture that allows the core video-serving technology to be separated into a collection of components that can then be shrink-wrapped and marketed independently. This was effectively a very large scale reengineering and refactoring project to convert the current vnl it systems into a collection of independent yet interoperable components.

I prototyped solutions and reviewed a number distributed technologies including .net (C#), j2ee, corba, and messaging.

I recommended an architecture that used corba as the communications protocol between systems, with new functionality implemented using j2ee technologies (ejb’s, jndi and jms). Existing legacy components and new functionality were then designed and developed according to my architecture by a team of four.

My responsibilities have included:

·         The technical success of the project.

·         Refactoring two core vnl systems as a template for other team members to follow

·         Comprehensive regression testing.

·         Mentoring junior and senior employees within and outside the team.

·         Organising technical seminars on existing and emerging technologies.

·         Liasing with 3^rd party software suppliers 

Client:      MWS Consulting Ltd (in-house)

Project:    Generic sme e-commerce platform, ongoing

Role:         Technical and Software Architect, Technical Lead, and Senior Developer

The generic sme e-commerce platform is a collection of simple, pluggable layers of software that allow an sme to quickly create and then maintain an e-commerce presence. It’s primary objectives are to be inexpensive to run and simple to maintain; the platform achieves this by using a combination of open source software and well established e-commerce ui paradigms.

The platform is implemented with JSP’s, servlets, Struts, JavaBeans and ejb’s using Tomcat, jboss and MySql.

Development of the system is ongoing. 

Client:      Video Networks Ltd, Stevenage, England

Project:    Customer Relationship Management Integration, Jan 2001—Mar 2002

Role:         Technical and Software Architect, Technical Lead and Senior Developer

Video Networks Ltd (vnl) is the IT company behind the HomeChoice Video-On-Demand digital TV service. vnl were replacing their bespoke 500 user call centre crm software with the Siebel crm package. The project involved the design and development of a collection of corba servers to wrap vnl’s legacy systems. These server components realize vnl’s business use cases and are invoked by Siebel. The corba servers are implemented as ejbs, with xml being used as the communications protocol between Siebel and corba. These components needed to be high availability and be highly scaleable. JBuilder and Inprise Application Server were used in conjunction with the Apache Xerces xml parser and Xalan xslt library. The test harness gui to the servers was written using servlets and jsps within a struts framework.

I worked on this project through its whole lifecycle. My responsibilities included:

·         Being the technical architect and technical lead. This included all the items listed below, as well as being responsible for the technical success of the project. It also included resolving technical problems for the team and reporting to management where appropriate.

·         Hardware and software choice for the corba/ejb servers.

·         Designing and implementing a proof of concept to demonstrate security, scaleability, reliability, robustness, load balancing and throughput of a sample corba/ejb server.

·         Interface design of the corba/ejb servers.

·         Low level design and implementation of one of the corba/ejb servers.

·         Writing high and low level technical and functional specifications

·         Coaching/mentoring/code reviewing other team members

·         Designing and developing the server test harnesses in jsps and servlets using the struts framework.

Employer: Access Gaming Systems, Sydney, Australia.

Duration:   1 year, April 1999—March 2000.

Project:    ACES Online Casino

Role:         Technical Architect, Team Leader and Senior Developer

Access is a product-based company that writes software for companies that wish to operate internet casinos. The software allows players to play games for cash and provides a variety of different games (e.g. slot machines, card games and other traditional casino games).

The software has a client side that is Jsp and Java applets, and a server side written using J2EE technologies (ejbs and servlets) and C++ that is distributed across pcs and Unix machines. The server side components communicate via corba (Iona’s Orbix). An Oracle database is used.

I was involved on the server side of the product, my tasks including:

·           Analysis and redesign of the high-level games’ architecture so that the writing of server side game logic could become part of a development kit. This allowed Access to sell the server side software to third party games' developers and was achieved by defining a hierarchy of Java interfaces and abstract classes.

·           Analysis and design of a sub-system to provide ‘linked jackpot’ functionality: a concept where separate players contribute to a common jackpot whilst playing normal games, each player having an equal chance of winning the linked jackpot. Technically challenging from a player-fairness point of view.

·           Analysis and redesign of a mechanism to decouple the front end and server side game logic into one component and the remaining server side logic into another component so that each component would be back- and forward-compatible with each other.

·           Design and implementation of a new game based on dice rolling.

·           Design and implementation of a mechanism to customise game availability as perceived by a player according to the location of the player and their currencies.

Employer: CMG UK Ltd

Duration:   1 year, September 1997-September 1998

Client:      Shell Oil Products International, London, England.

Project:    cross: Customisable Routing/Scheduling Software, 1 year Sep 97-Sep 98

Role:         Consultant, Software Architect, Senior Developer, Researcher

The cross system is a globally deployed piece of logistics software that allows Shell to schedule delivery of petroleum products to petrol stations. The system optimises the routing for a fleet of vehicles, taking into account constraints such as vehicle loading restrictions and time. cross uses a Powerbuilder front end, C++ and Java business logic, and an Oracle database.

I researched, designed and developed the calculation engine that optimised the routing of the vehicle fleet, instructing drivers where and when to collect petrol products and where and when to deliver them via a specified route.

My tasks included:

·           Improving the performance of the calculation engine. I reduced the average run time from over an hour to six minutes.

·           Restructuring and refactoring the code to make it object based and easier to maintain.

·           Analysing, designing and implementing extensions to the routing logic to handle locale-specific restrictions. 

Employer: Quidnunc Ltd, London, England.

Duration:   2 years, August 1995—August 1997

I worked on a number of projects during my time at Quidnunc and was part of the team that determined the technical direction of the company. I was also the technical expert on a number of project bids (presales).

Client:      Financial Times Information (FTI), London, England.

Project:    World Reporter, 6 months, Jan 1997—Aug 1997

Role:         Consultant

World Reporter is a document processing and cross referencing system that receives documents from around the world in a variety of formats (e.g. raw text, photocopied document); it then parses, indexes and cross references the documents according to customer-specific keywords. Relevant documents are then collated and sent to the customer.

The application is deployed as a collection of C++ corba components and allows different parsers to be plugged in (e.g. pdf, ms Word documents). The cross-referencing is performed by Verity.

I was a technical consultant on this project, performing the analysis and design of the system architecture and the interfaces that defined how fti could write their own server-side parsers as new document formats were handled by the system.

Client:      Goldman Sachs Asset Management, London, England.

Project:    Fxfe—Foreign Exchange Front End, 8 months, March 1996—Nov 1996

Role:         Developer

Fxfe enables Fx traders to automate the management trades throughout their lifecycle. An extension of the application enables the grouping of similar trades together into a block trade. This is significantly reduces the workload of the traders and is a very complex algorithm.

The application is written as a collection of C++ components running on Unix and uses a Sybase database. The components allow different data feeds to be plugged into a core block-trade generation component that is then manipulated via the gui component.

I was the analyst, designer and developer on the gui component and the block trade generation component.

References

References are available upon request.