Skills
- 17 years solid experience in Ruby / Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, MySQL and Postgres
- 8 years experience with React and React Native
- Strong front-end HTML/CSS
- Committed to security, accessibility, and automated testing
- Working experience with Kubernetes, GCP, and Linux systems administration
- Strong understanding of business and product development
- Ability to hit the ground running whether building from scratch or working with existing codebases
Work History
Bit Boutique
Owner / Lead Developer
Smart Pension
Senior Ruby Engineer
I worked in investment engineering for Smart's Keystone pension platform.
My duties included:
- Day-to-day individual contributor - working through feature, bug and improvements, code reviews
- Part of the technical design, internal advocacy, and implementation team for a major upgrade to multi-currency support across the whole platform
- Mentoring & domain knowledge sharing through documentation and pairing
- Operations commander rotation - trusted role with production AWS access for production support queries
Reallyenglish
CTO / Lead Developer / Senior Developer
I started Reallyenglish as a software developer and took over as development team lead in 2013. In 2019 I became CTO of the global Reallyenglish company.
My duties as a hands-on CTO included:
- Software development & architecture
- Cloud infrastructure management
- Technical project management
- Product & Service roadmaps
- Working with CEO/CFO to prioritise development around business goals
- Refining development, support, and testing processes
- Hiring and supporting developers
- Defining and communicating internal policies and processes e.g. security practices, breech disclosures, secure development
- IT budget management for cloud infrastructure and staff machines
During my time at Reallyenglish I:
- Developed and managed the transition to a platform for developing course content. This meant that to new course content projects could be developed with less software development work - in some cases, none at all.
- Developed and managed building of our mobile app and subsequent upgrades.
- Established QA testing processes
- Expanded the development team and processes
Curve21
Founder & Tech Lead
Curve21 was a small web development agency that I ran for 6 years serving a range of clients working on over 40 different websites and applications. I was one of three developers and oversaw all aspects of architecture, project management and code. In addition, I managed client & internal web servers.
Our approach was to work closely with clients, running on site workshops with prototypes and working code to create a solution that matches real-world needs rather than a spec sheet.
Many of the projects have since been replaced or changed but here are some examples of client projects we worked on:
Communities for Renewables
Project to help local communities in Cornwall assess an area for wind turbine installation.
- JavaScript annotated mapping interface
- Map server with postgis & mapserver
- Use of OS and bespoke GIS layers
- Dynamic data forms with custom calculations
DoSomethingDifferent
- Bespoke Consumer ecommerce system
- Trade-only ecommerce interface with custom pricing Trade API
- Affiliates system with partial white labelling
- Full back office website administration
- Back office order, supplier, invoice & account tracking Multiple currencies
Strings Direct
- Bespoke ecommerce system
- Stock & pricing integration with onsite database
- Full order & shipping tracking
- Multiple payment integrations with repeat credit card transactions
- Back office administration
- Amazon marketplace integration
- Google shopping integration
- Multiple currencies
Islington Council's Energy Centre Advice Database
- Configurable contact database of referral forms Automated previously manual tasks
- PDF letter generation
- Reporting & exporting
- Partner company referral management interface
Curve21's Custom CMS
- Flexible content management system
- Extensible content type platform
- HTML, CSS, Javascript edited online via a theme editor
- Automated custom caching of front end elements
- Social media integration
- Custom form builder with emailing & data storage
Freelance
Web Developer
Variety of projects in a number of languages & platforms including a bespoke booking system for Brighton & Hove buses.
Fastnet International
System Administrator / Web Developer
- ISP Technical Support
- *nix & Windows ISP systems administration (Web, Mail, DNS, DSL etc)
- Internal and Client software development