Nigel Ramsay

Nigel Ramsay

Technical Consultant at Able Technology

New Zealand

Current
  • Technical Consultant at CustomerCentrix
  • Entrepreneur at Sharesight Limited
  • Director at Able Technology Limited
Past
  • Technical Consultant at Ministry of Social Development
  • J2EE & Portal Developer at Inland Revenue
  • Senior Analyst / Programmer at Westpac

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Education
  • Massey University
  • Massey University
Recommended
Nigel has 3 recommendation(s) 3 people have recommended Nigel
Connections
102 connections
Industry
Computer Software
Websites

Nigel Ramsay’s Summary

Commercial Experience

I have been involved in the software industry for over 10 years. I have progressed from a Programmers position to Technical Lead, with responsibilities for technical leadership and architecture. I have particular experience with consulting firms and the financial industry – both in New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Architectural Design

I am confident in designing the architecture for J2EE based systems, and their interaction with non-Java technologies. My experience with the diverse technologies at both Government and Financial institutions, as the unique challenges provided at technology start-ups, give me a sound architectural background. I have been defining project architectures for 4 years.

Leadership

As the Technical Lead, I am responsible for managing the Java Developers in my team. This includes allocation of work, monitoring and reviewing progress, and overseeing the resolution of any issues that arise.

I also work with the Lead Business Analyst and the Project Manager in reviewing and clarifying business requirements and exploring the most effective ways to meet the needs of the business.

Nigel Ramsay’s Specialties:

Ruby on Rails

I have extensive experience with the Rails framework. I have completed a number of Rails based applications including a share portfolio manager, and credit card payments gateway.

J2EE

I have 8 years of experience with Java (inc J2EE, Spring, Portal). Mostly based around the development of large-scale systems.

Internet

I have 11 years of experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Nigel Ramsay’s Experience

  • Technical Consultant

    CustomerCentrix

    (Internet industry)

    November 2008 — Present (1 month)

    Working on aWebStorm.com - a SaaS application for load testing.

  • Entrepreneur

    Sharesight Limited

    (Investment Management industry)

    July 2007 — Present (1 year 5 months)

    Sharesight is a joint venture between the directors of Able Technology and two local entrepreneurs. Sharesight has built an online portfolio management application.

    My role as Technical Consultant is to design and implement the technical aspects of this business. This involves everything from developing the web-based Ruby on Rails application to tuning the MySQL database. Also leasing and administering the hardware; system integration with various vendors such as NZX, ASX and Google.

    This project has called for an extreme range of skills, which I have delivered.

  • Director

    Able Technology Limited

    (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

    January 2006 — Present (2 years 11 months)

    Managing the responsibilities that any small business has, including commitments to:
    - Inland Revenue
    - Companies Office

  • Technical Consultant

    Ministry of Social Development

    (Government Administration industry)

    June 2008 — October 2008 (5 months)

    Training Java developers to use Ruby-on-Rails, while leading a medium sized Rails project.

  • J2EE & Portal Developer

    Inland Revenue

    (Government Agency; 1001-5000 employees; Government Administration industry)

    January 2006 — March 2008 (2 years 3 months)

    KiwiSaver for Inland Revenue

    My role as a Technical Consultant was to work with the business to understand their requirements, and to provide effective solutions.

    The KiwiSaver Portal was developed using WebSphere Portal Server and the Spring Framework. Communication with backend systems was realised with Soap Web Services and JMS.

    Manage My Family for Inland Revenue

    My role as the Lead Developer on this project was to work with the business on refining the requirements, while also discovering the technical integration with the various systems at Inland Revenue. I built the front-end system.

    The project was developed using a proprietary in-house web framework running on Tomcat application server. Communication with backend systems was achieved using SOAP Web Services and JMS. The front-end was built to the strict requirements of the State Services Commission. These being strict HTML4 compliance with tableless CSS2 screen layouts.

  • Senior Analyst / Programmer

    Westpac

    (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Banking industry)

    April 2004 — January 2006 (1 year 10 months)

    Referrals and Leads Management

    A web-based application for gathering customer referral and lead information and sending it to various parties throughout the bank.

    My role as the Technical Lead involved management of both the people and the technologies involved in the project. I worked actively with the Project Manager in planning the project timelines, and directing the resources available to achieve them.

    The project was written using the Websphere Application Server, talking to DB2 for database, and MQ for Host services. The Struts Web Application Framework and Hibernate Object Relational Mapping tools were used.

    The Agile Development Process known as “Feature Driven Development” was used.

    Subject Matter Expert – User Interface Design

    I was the designated Subject Matter Expert at Westpac for User Interface design. Specifically, this includes both the processes used to define the interfaces, as well as the technologies used.

  • Senior Analyst / Programmer

    National Bank of New Zealand

    (Public Company; Banking industry)

    2002 — 2004 (2 years)

    Credit Application Tool

    My role was to provide architectural oversight and development for this J2EE and Visual Basic project.

    Loan Automation Project

    The diverse technologies used reflect the integrated nature of this application. Visual Basic is used on the client, and this communicates with both Weblogic and Tuxedo servers. XML is used as the communication mechanism between client and server. The Weblogic server communicates with an IBM mainframe application via an MTS gateway. The database is Oracle, and the OS is Solaris. We use JMS for asynchronous processes and scheduled offline tasks.

    My role was to design and develop new features for this application. Also, as a Senior Analyst / Programmer, I assisted in the development and mentoring of staff. We use the Rational Unified Process.

    Tools used include Eclipse, Ant, CVS, SourceSafe, and Log4j.

  • Senior Analyst / Programmer

    Deutsche Bank

    (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; Banking industry)

    March 2001 — October 2001 (8 months)

    My Global Markets portal
    Responsible for the architecture, design and development of a portal framework which allows customers of Deutsche Bank to select and display customised information on a personal web page.

    We provided common functionality - for example, custom JSP tag libraries, and auto-save functionality for edit pages. This was successful as we ended up having portlets developed by other divisions - from New York and London. In fact, one of the other divisions was so impressed that they decided to stop their development with Weblogic Personalisation Server and move to our custom portal framework.

    The portal was based on "Model 2" JSP and Servlet technology. This ran under an iPlanet based server. We later added in support from Weblogic 6 for EJB Session Beans. The database was Oracle 8i. The operating system was Solaris. We used other technologies such as Ant, Log4j, and database connection pooling from the Apache group.

  • Senior Developer

    Web-Imps Limited

    (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

    March 2000 — February 2001 (1 year)

    Media Tracker project for International Federation of Phonographic Industry IFPI / RIAA

    Responsible for the development of the Intranet based web application for managing the detection, enforcement and removal of illegal media on the Internet.

    The application managed various external search services through a Servlet / XML interface. It provided the information required for a search to take place, and received the results. The results were passed to an EJB Session for persistence in an Oracle Database.

    IFPI's staff around the world could view the collected information through a web browser. The findings would be grouped to create various 'cases' such as investigations, escalations, etc.

    Other features included user management, security, email generation, "whois" queries, reverse-dns queries, HTTP redirection detections, etc. We used JavaScript based client-side validation. In short, the application managed the client's entire business process in a highly automated manner.

  • Java Consultant

    Synergy International Limited

    (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

    March 1999 — February 2000 (1 year)

    History Data Viewer for Transpower New Zealand

    The History Data Viewer is an intranet application used for viewing historical customer data from a large Data Warehouse.

    The Orca Project for New Zealand Post
    The Orca Application is a Visual Basic based three-tier application that manages the productivity of Mail Sorting Centres. The client application runs on Windows PCs and the server / database components are hosted on Microsoft Transaction Server on Windows NT Server boxes.

    I implemented additional modules to calculate statistics about staff productivity for an existing application. The results were displayed in custom controls and graphs.

    Other tasks included the installation and administration of Oracle Databases, Windows NT Servers and Linux Servers. I mentored the graduate staff, and liased with the clients.

  • Analyst / Programmer

    IBM New Zealand

    (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; IBM; Information Technology and Services industry)

    January 1997 — March 1999 (2 years 3 months)

    Java and C++ Framework Development
    IBM were developing C++ and Java based upgrades to an existing Customer Management application. The application managed many business processes at the call centres of Telecommunications Companies.

    Research Project

    I was sponsored by IBM to perform research into new Internet Technologies. This was the research portion of my thesis for the Master of Technology degree.

    I designed and developed two major proof-of-concept applications. The first application investigated how Java technologies could be used to harness information in an existing database. It provided electronic commerce capabilities over the Internet using Java Applets.

    The second application that I developed used CORBA to link an existing C++ based application to a Java Applet. This application made use of the existing functionality to provide new services.

Nigel Ramsay’s Education

  • Massey University

    MTech (hons), Information Engineering, 1997 — 1997

    Research Project

    I was sponsored by IBM to perform research into new Internet Technologies. This was the research portion of my thesis for the Master of Technology degree.

    I designed and developed two major proof-of-concept applications. The first application investigated how Java technologies could be used to harness information in an existing database. It provided electronic commerce capabilities over the Internet using Java Applets.

    The second application that I developed used CORBA to link an existing C++ based application to a Java Applet. This application made use of the existing functionality to provide new services.

  • Massey University

    BTech (hons), Information Engineering, 1993 — 1996

Additional Information

Nigel Ramsay’s Websites:

Nigel Ramsay’s Interests:

mountain biking, voip, wifi, shares

Nigel Ramsay’s Groups:

WellRailed, NZCS, Onslow Community Church

  •    Ruby on Rails
  •    Feature Driven Development - FDD
  •    New Zealand Computer Society (NZCS)
  •    New Zealand Web Development
  •    Prototype Community

Nigel Ramsay’s Honors:

US Patent 6647360 awarded - "Scrolling of database information"

Nigel Ramsay’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

  • career opportunities
  • consulting offers
  • new ventures
  • job inquiries
  • expertise requests
  • business deals
  • reference requests
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