I like learning new things, techy things in particular. I’m often found spending my evenings and weekends hacking together the latest libraries or trying out some new tech. I have a RasberyPi based connected home, coupled with Amazon Echo (Alexa) and I'm always looking for ways to add more tech to this IOT platform. I enjoy reading and when not ploughing through tech blogs I like to read things that still require the grey matter, from “The God Delusion” to “Chaotic Fishponds”, I think sparking debate amongst my mates in the pub, is a great way to spend the evening. Without this sounding too much of a cliché, I really do like, Good Food, Good Whisk[e]y, Good Wine and the odd walk in the Countryside.

Co-founder of 60 Innovations providing technical leadership and guidance through a range of services and engagements.

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As a Software Consultant and Head of Engineering I worked across several projects at Cake, ensuring projects are scalable, reactive and fit for purpose with a focus on quality, delivery and architecture. I worked alongside the Team leads helping resolve architectural problems and ensuring projects were delivered on time and on budget. I also consulted in Scala/Akka and worked with several startups in terms of product discovery and Proof of Concept implementations. As a board advisor and member of the senior team, I helped form and realise the techincal strategy for the business, instiling the vison within the development teams, I lead reruitment, defining process and helping grow the engineering team within the UK to circa 50 engineers. I provided mentoring to the Team leads helping them improve managerial skills, allowing them to create efficient and highly productive teams.

One of around 20 Software developers using a range of Java / J2EE toolsets to continue the support and development of CDL’s flagship product;

Strata – an n-tier, J2EE based, full policy lifecycle enterprise solution for personal lines and commercial insurance brokerages: the team ranges from recent graduates to experienced architects. I have been involved in several business critical projects from conception through to delivery and have experienced all aspects of SDLC using both waterfall and agile methodologies. Later projects used Atern Agile methodoligies working to fixed timescales, using timeboxing and iterative development.

ETLTool : Involved in the design and implementation of a product to migrate Insurance data from a legacy system into the next generation enterprise solution. The application gave exposure to performant loading of large XML files using StAx/JAXB and Java Persistence Annotations(JPA) using Hibernate as the entity provider. Multi-threaded data processers where created using the Java concurrency toolset to enable high throughput and program efficiency. I gained experience of performance tuning applications using monitoring tools such as JConsole and YourKit. During Go-live I performed first and third line support for the migration application, talking to customers and liaising with business representatives.

Email Generation Engine : Created an extension to the document generation system, to enable Html emails to be created within the application. Incorporated a velocity engine to allow for HTML templating and added functionality to allow Policy information to be added via an internal API call. Project was an Agile development using fixed timescales, TDD and iterative development, the architecture took advantage of dependency injection creating cohesive, decoupled code.

Prescribe / PDF Converter : Involved in the enhancement and support of a document conversion engine, translating insurance documentation from Prescribe(Kyocera Printer Language) into PDF format using Apache Batik and FOP. Also created a WebService for integration into the Enterprise insurance App, and a regression harness for QA testing.

Integration Test API – Created a programming interface to facilitate the dynamic creation of realistic test data used by the integration tests of the enterprise system. Allowing for removal of extensive boiler plate code created for test data construction. General Enhancement and support of the core application, I have been involved in several smaller projects adding functionality to the enterprise system. This has given me exposure to enterprise technologies including EJB, JMS, Hibernate & JPA, XML, XSLT, JAX-WS, Soap, Tomcat, Weblogic, Ant & Maven.

Applied Computing was a Computer Science based course mixing the theoretical fundamentals and the application of those skills in industry.

• Java Programming – Object orientated programming skills using polymorphism, Abstraction, Inheritance etc. I developed several java applets, GUI applications and Web Server applications. Course explored core programming principles and design patterns, each of which were tested throughout the years by exam and project assessment.
• Systems Analysis & design – Relational Data Normalisation exploring normal form rationalisation, Data modelling including UML & EER Diagrams, project planning using Gantt Charts and experience with the IBM Rational rose software package.
• Database Development – Data warehousing, Data mining, OLAP and developing both relational and object orientated databases using Oracle 10g, gaining a good knowledge of SQL and experience with Oracle form/report builder and Oracle discoverer. I also became familiar with Ms Access and Visual Studio using vb.net/ado.net framework.
• Media & Web Development – Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Director, web design techniques, Client side scripting Html/CSS/JavaScript, Server side Scripting using Perl and PHP, and internet programming using Java Servlets and JSP.
• Professional issues - Application of computers in industry, Computing law covering the current legal framework and the Data Protection act, professional development and professional bodies in IT.
• Computer Networks – Subneting/Supernetting, protocol stacks, network topology, network design, network administration and security, bash/shell scripting, Python Scripting, cryptography methods and network analysis.
• End User Support - Computer Hardware ~ looking at busses, interconnects, Processors and low level components with some assembly language programming. Windows Server 2003 configuration and Windows administration for 2000 onwards, Using Active Directory and other administration services.
• Computing Mathematics - Logic, Algebra, Binary/octal/hexadecimal mathematics essentially 'Computer Science 101'