Hexcel

Started: October 2024

Hexcel is a global leader in advanced composites technology. I was hired to work on their internal systems, including a new Azure hosted application for managing the manufacturing process of composite materials.

My role was to take over the project from a previous contractor and bring it up to production quality, including implementing an Azure DevOps pipeline and unit testing.

Asda

October 2022 - March 2024

I was invited to join Asda having worked with several of the people on the team previously at Credit Karma. The project was to replace the existing Walmart Scan & Go software with a new Asda version. This is a multi-faceted project involving React Native development for mobile phones and in-store handsets, as well as being responsible for the backend basket handling service that ran on Azure Functions and used a Cosmos DB in conjunction with an external retail service provider (NCR).

My extensive experience of .Net also helped solve a critical issue for the team.

Fixzy Assist

April 2022 - October 2022

This client was a start-up company that was developing an innovative augmented reality application for measuring room spaces with an AI functionality for identifying mold related damage for the insurance industry. I was responsible for taking a former Laravel PHP solution onto an Azure platform, developing .Net additions and working on a React Native client.

Halfway through the year, the CTO resigned, and I stepped in to perform that duty and manage the team of developers.

Gre-Eco

January 2022 - April 2022

My client wanted an existing HTML site rewritten in React with an Azure backend for serving project content including site images, documents and recommendations in order to facilitate easy updating. Site includes an administrative site area for managing and uploading new content with the minimum of training required.

Iliad Solutions

September 2019 - February 2022

This was an unusual contract as I was hired solely for my strong web frontend skills, the API was Java based of which I had little experience. I took the lead front end developer role on three key projects for Iliad, whose business is writing data transaction verification software for the financial industries. The projects were complex, customer-facing, m ulti-lingual projects that had to support multiple branding and an intuitive design.

My role proved to be essential to Iliad as I was able to lend my experience of architecture, project management and Agile practices, and mentor several their junior developers, even when Covid meant that the last two years of the contract were entire remotely operated.

Credit Karma

March 2019 - August 2019

I moved with the Noddle team to Credit Karma when it was bought out from TransUnion. I was responsible for writing a bureau integration layer in Scala to enable the existing Credit Karma infrastructure to interact with the TransUnion UK services.

CallCredit / TransUnion

February 2018 - March 2019

CallCredit hired me to lead a new development strategy using Angular to help modularize an existing 'monolithic' ASP.Net MVC application that was their public facing Noddle application (www.noddle.co.uk). I created an Angular subsite and ASP.Net Web API for handling loan and credit card searches, with an emphasis on automated UX testing and feedback across multiple devices and platforms.

CallCredit was bought by TransUnion mid-way through the contract, and the Noddle product was divested to Credit Karma. I switched to React to rebrand the existing Noddle application using Credit Karma's preferred web application platform.

Duradiamond Healthcare Ltd.

March 2016 - December 2017

I was approached by the client to set-up a greenfield project to develop a healthcare management system where I had total control over the architecture, technologies and development methodologies, with the only requirement was that it should be Azure hosted.

As an experienced full-stack developer, I was able to develop the system and build up a distributed development team over the course of 20 months.

By the end of the project, the system utilized a wide range of Azure services (including Azure Active Directory and integration to Office 365 and Sharepoint) and was being used by private and government agencies with over 12,000 users and netting over £12m in revenue per year.

Capita Asset Management

November 2015 - February 2016

Worked with development team on a rewriting of their share dealing product written in using NodeJS to deliver a AngularJS based user interface with an ASP.Net Web API backend.

I joined the team towards the end of their first phase of development when they were involved with an intensive defect fixing and technical debt curing.

Mission Without Borders International

September 2015 - October 2015

Mission Without Borders approached me to produce a financial application that would enable them to upload and process bank transaction information, and matching this information with their existing database of donors and campaigns. This was a Html/Javascript/AngularJS front end with an ASP.Net Web API backend. I was approached by their IT director, who is a former colleague for mine from a previous contract, to produce a solution for them very quickly.

The project was handled using a Scrum process utilizing Visual Studio Online.

Piksel

January 2015 - September 2015

I was hired to work with their client, Channel 4, to rebrand their 4OD on demand Windows Phone and Windows 8 applications to the new All4 brand.

When this was completed, they asked me to extend my contract for another six months to work with their team on a Window 8 application for AT&T comprising of video on demand, live streaming and DVR where I was able to bring many years of experience to the project.

Capita Customer Management

September 2014 - November 2014

Worked on the CapitaSync project - software designed to work in a call centre environment for their customers O2 and Carphone Warehouse. I was lead developer for a team of 5 and I implemented a Scrum process for the whole team from Analysts to Testers to run the O2 and Carphone Warehouse projects.

McLaren F1 Racing Ltd.

July 2013 - July 2014

Worked closely with the Formula One racing team on developing their in-house software called MIDAS which was responsible for processing and displaying complex data including race telemetry, Computational Fluid Dynamic simulations and car configuration data. This was a hugely complex system, in its ninth iteration, and involved getting taking a lot of new information onboard whilst working with a team of outstanding developers.

My main area of concern was overhauling the user interface for MIDAS to produce a look and feel that is very similar to Windows RT style of Office 2013. I would not normally consider working so far from home, but this was such an exciting role and I was such an outstanding skills match for them that we both agreed to allow me to work partially on site in Woking and partially remotely.

Communisis

April 2012 - July 2013

Worked on pilot project for a customer driven printing application to be used by major banks and service companies in order to streamline outsourced printing and multi-channel communication. I did lots of work on UI as well as RESTful back end services for sending emails and SMS messages.

After the pilot, I was rehired to continue through phase 1 and 2 releases of the product where we moved the Ext.Js prototype to use Knockout, Sammy and eventually Angular.Js . Drove a Scrum process around TFS 2012.

Jet2

September 2011 - March 2012

Developing a completely bespoke Business Intelligence dashboard in Silverlight that works in conjunction with existing database analysis systems and other data sources.

Anker International Plc

April 2011 - September 2011

Worked with a team of developers to develop a studio resource/project management system where I was lead-developer.

Tunstall Healthcare (UK) Ltd.

April 2011 - September 2011

Hired to work as part of developer team on Tunstall’s replacement of existing telephony call centre software. WPF front-end, IVR systems and telephony integration

Ioko - LoveFilm

February 2011 - April 2011

Ioko rehired me to work on LoveFilm's new web movie player that was implemented in Silverlight 4. I was the lead developer on this project working closely with the Ioko's VP of architecture based in London and I was solely responsible for implementing the Silverlight user-interface.

The Big Word

October 2010 - February 2011

I worked with a team of developers that were creating a new language translation management system for The Big Word. This was a web based application with a managed workflow backend. My responsibilities included creating UI development in ASP.Net MVC2 and jQuery, developing a whole new backend system for managing Translation Memory that fuzzy matched to previous translations, and advancing the team’s work in WPF and Silverlight. I worked alongside other contract and permanent developers and the senior project management team.

Ioko - Sky Player

July 2010 - October 2010

I worked on the main download client for the Sky Player Desktop (Sky’s product for viewing content on/off line). I worked with a team of 3 developers and my main area of responsibility was the Silverlight front-end user interface. This involved using the very latest, cutting edge development with the platform, working with the Microsoft Silverlight team to iron out issues we discovered in Silverlight.

Ioko employs some of the most highly skilled, creative and brilliant developers and it was a fantastic experience for me to work there.

Yorkshire Water

June 2010 - July 2010

This was a short-term contract in which I was able to work on their accounts portal. This was a customer facing site for domestic and business customers. My main area of responsibility was to implement a logging and diagnostic system, recording activity on the website as well as some user-interface work on areas of the web site.

Documentric

February 2010 - May 2010

Documetric were replacing a 20 year old Unix system with a new system written in .Net and using a SQL Server 2005 backend. I was hired to help out on this project, particularly adding my knowledge and experience of web applications to their development team.

My largest contribution was to create a Help Desk application written in Silverlight, using MVVM architecture and communicating to a back-end web service via WCF. The Silverlight application allowed them to deploy an application via their intranet that had a desk-top like user interface and had the option of running outside of the browser. The use of MVVM enabled the application to be extensively unit tested with NUnit and MOQ.

GDF Suez

August 2009 - December 2009

GDF had an ASP.Net web application project that had been developed by an external team and was running over schedule. I was hired to assist with the project and immediately spotted issues with the quality and performance of the web application code. My extensive experience of good architectural design, ASP.Net 3.5, AJAX and Linq were instrumental in bringing the project from potential cancellation to a level that was highly optimized and easy to maintain.

As part of the work re-architecting the solution, I created a Silverlight version of the ASP.Net application with a WCF service layer.

At the request of my client, I mentored several of their more junior staff in development practices and provided in-house training sessions on ASP.Net, ASP.Net AJAX, LINQ (including Linq-to-SQL) and Silverlight.

Pollard's Tea and Coffee

May 2009 - July 2009

I was hired by Pollards to produce an application that would integrate with their existing VOIP telephony system. The user interface had to be visually slick and impactful and was created using WPF.

Foretel

April 2009 - May 2009

Foretel asked me to help them out with a few projects that were overrunning. This contract including configuring and customizing a Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution and using SQL Server Reporting Servers to add custom reports to a CRM system

GlobalLive

January 2009 - April 2009

I was hired for this role on a personal recommendation by one of the existing contractors to help bring their prototype product back on track and business focused. This was a WPF desktop client application with a WCF hosted backend. I introduced some design patterns to the project, the most significant was using the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern for WPF UI design, and I developed a number of modules. In conjunction with their lead developer, I also helped them optimize their database and restructure the application to an n-tier design.

Manheim

July 2007 - September 2007

My role at Manheim was to guide them in all aspects of a new pan-European .Net project. They have been a Progress development house for over 20 years, so .Net was a relatively new technology to them. My role was not only to head up the development team, but also to act as a technology consultant and advise on modern methods of project management. My responsibilities included:-

Solution Architecture: As they were new to .Net development, I've been the main technical key in designing and developing this application.

Database Design: The database design for the application was based on a legacy Progress system. This design was in need of normalisation and refactoring and was moved to a SQL 2005 platform. The project requirements included on site database instances that were copied to a central database using replication.

Project Management: I introduced the development management to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and I installed it throughout the department. This is now used in all their development and testing work.

Recruitment: As they were inexperienced with .Net development, I played a key role in the assessment of developers for recruitment.

The project is now successfully deployed in several locations in Portugal, Germany and Spain and their .Net development has grown from 0 to 20 developers whilst I have been there.

Whilst I was at Manheim, the Silverlight 2.0 platform became available from beta and I used this to develop some of the screens from their desktop application in a web environment. We also used Silverlight to build a front-end for language translations database. Both Silverlight applications connected to a WCF data service back-end and used the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern.

Foretel

October 2007 - December 2008

This project was to add some extra functionality to an existing data visualization system that I was the original lead developer on in 2004. This was a web/desktop application mainly used by Sheffield council.

Epitomy

February 2007 - July 2007

This project was to develop an innovative web application to support their parts warrantee system for their clients. The system allowed their clients to tailor the application’s business processes using Windows Workflow. The system integrated with their existing electronic catalogue system.