
Web / Media / iPhone
Colchester, United Kingdom

Web / Media / iPhone
Colchester, United Kingdom
Experienced Information Technology Professional with proven expertise in developing innovative Web Applications for large corporations. Works closely and effectively with all levels of management to satisfy project and productivity requirements. Offers logical, forthright thinking and is able to provide effective solutions to solve difficult problems.
Capable of objective analysis and skilled at making quick decisions based on wisdom, experience, and judgment. Demonstrates commitment to superior customer service through positive attitude, leadership & hands-on teamwork.
Great team-player & fun attitude, competent time management, very dependable under pressure and passionately dedicated to the task.
Ruby on Rails 4yrs, ASP.NET 7yrs, PHP 2yrs, C# 2yrs, Python & Django 1yr
5-6 yrs accomplished front-end JavaScript AJAX, CSS 2.1, XHTML
Coding to web standards, degradable javascript, maintainable code
Cross-Browser testing & Javascript debugging, Selenium
SEO, Analytics and tuning
LAMP, remote deployment, security & firewalling
Agile experience, test-driven development, ZenTest, versioning
OOP, Design Patterns, REST & MVC Framework
Competent Photoshop skills, ActionScript & Flex work
(Online Media industry)
January 2000 — Present (9 years 11 months)
Personal site, now 7 years & going strong. Technical tutorials, code snippets & research. Ported from Typo to my own RoR CMS.
(Internet industry)
January 2009 — February 2009 (2 months)
Short-term contract, working with a small team of 3. Produced image converter for Wedgwood Collection using Ruby with WxRuby & FasterCSV. Helped create Horniman Museum Intranet with the CodeIgniter PHP framework, adapting our in-house CMS to requirements.
Google Maps API development for National Galleries of Scotland 'Artist Rooms' event
(Online Media industry)
September 2007 — December 2008 (1 year 4 months)
Helped win Yahoo's award for innovation by helping construct one of the most unique consumer websites.
Versatile role working in a team of 8 developers. Agile environment, developing the Moveme Calendar and Moving Tools using MooTools, Prototype and the jQuery AJAX frameworks; focusing strongly on front-end, cross-browser debugging & adhering to W3C conventions. Implement & tuned WebTrends, Zanox site tagging analytics, client-side A-B testing.
Branding & bug-testing the ajax planner and mini-tools for integration into partner sites SKY, MSN, AOL.
Improving performance with YSlow, CDN, lazy-loading, code profiling and helping re-develop back-end web-services in an iterative development cycle.
Agile with 2-4 week sprints, daily scrum meetings, burn-down charting, task weighting, pair-programming, continuous refactoring, code-coverage against tests.
Yahoo Peoples Choice Award 2008
Best B2C Application BIMA Awards 2007
Best Website BIMA Awards 2007
NMA Best New Business 2007
(Internet industry)
July 2007 — September 2008 (1 year 3 months)
July 2008 saw successful re-launch of this independently run RoR project, porting the .NET & SQL db of a unique double-dating social network. Recently featured on UK television, work is underway on a parallel Facebook app to work with the main site and improve growth.
A personal project working with original founders, completely revamped site from wire-frames and design meetings. Using Ruby, Liquid templates, ActionMailer, clustering, GeoCoding, jQuery with daily backups and redundancy, versioned with GIT & github.com.
(Internet industry)
July 2007 — January 2008 (7 months)
Part-time Ruby project tele-conferencing with partners in the US and Tokyo. Creating first-stage social network with similar functionality of LinkedIn & Facebook. Creating Storyboards for concept work, database models and logic analysis, plus initial code template & carrying out market research.
(Internet industry)
October 2007 — November 2007 (2 months)
Short-term project, working with developers overseas creating Ruby screen acquisition tools for isolating content for partners YouTube and MetaCafe. Processing and dispatching automatically as XML data for portal use.
(Public Company; WSH; Civil Engineering industry)
June 2000 — September 2007 (7 years 4 months)
IS team leader workin with a small team of 3, primarily involved in producing and delivering Web Applications for both internal and external clients.
Employing .NET, Ruby, C#, PHP, JAVA, JavaScript, XML-XSLT on a variety of projects; plus development and deployment of SQL Server data servers.
Notables include forums, corporate Q/A web-based sessions, internal CMS and online procurement application (PRIMO) for global offices. Helped integrate CRM with business SAGE Saleslogix system. Replaced IIS search with Google Mini appliance and XSLT filters. WebTrends analytics to track client traffic. Supported staff with hands-on training of new technologies, staff presentations and technical support. Promoting use of Agile methods within my team, implementing code versioning and improving documentation.
Responsible for web-server maintenance, upgrade and deployment. Hosted within a virtual n-tier environment, with 5-10 sql servers & 3 IIS servers across multiple physical locations.
(Public Company; RTR.L; Financial Services industry)
September 1998 — May 2000 (1 year 9 months)
Team member, chiefly responsible for Y2K upgrade of warehouse & asset management systems.
Developing tools to automate data processing & management of SQL Server. Notable achievements include automated documentation tools, custom DLL libraries, timers, calendars, SMTP and email batch processing. Helped port existing code to better designed OOP layout.
(Commercial Real Estate industry)
July 1989 — July 1998 (9 years 1 month)
Focusing on software development, database design with admin duties for company's asset network. Worked as team leader designing IT infrastructure, permanent and part-time while finishing eduction.
Notables include creating online property management package (GreyWolf), supporting auto-backup, restore, mail-merge, reporting, documentation and accounting. Helped with on-site staff training and learning labs on new technologies
(Construction industry)
July 1996 — September 1996 (3 months)
Contract role while in University. Most notably creating dBase package for local timber yard to handle stock estimation, admin, re-ordering and job tracking. Carried out full life-cycle design, round-table discussions with staff and managers to build the perfect system. After which supplied training, support and on-site visits overseeing final deployment, hand-over with support visits.
(Maritime industry)
July 1995 — September 1995 (3 months)
Short-term contract position while in university to help re-engineer existing dBase software for large Harwich-based shipping firm. Refactored code, improved maintainability and produced documentation & black-box testing. Reveloped existing tools to better train staff, presenting final system to managers, along with on-site support.
(Hospitality industry)
February 1991 — July 1991 (6 months)
While at college work-experience position arranged by myself and the hotel manager to supply a software package to handle stock-taking and accounting. Carried out staff interviews, questionnaires, group presentations and brain-storming sessions to design package. Developed full RDBMS suite with reporting, backup & recovery, mail-merge and archival; creating framework for future developments. Then provided support and training after final roll-out.
BSc Hons , Information Systems Development , 1994 — 1998
(1998) Published paper on user interface design for the software industry. Employing research into human cognitive abilities, GUI layout, widgets and usability testing.
ND in Computer Studies 1992 — 1994
NVQ in Business Administration 1991 — 1992
Diploma in Vocational Education 1991 — 1992
Business Technology and Communication, English, Maths, Science 1984 — 1991
Film, Theatre, Photography, Ice Hockey, amateur guitarist and film maker. Fluent English, learning french.
* Regular attendee of Web conferences. Presented at BarCamp and providing support for new projects.
* Server construction & maintenance for personal development.
* Blog regularly on new technologies that interest me.
Photography for Air Canada, The Daily Mail and Universities
Published Thesis on 'User Interface Design' in 1998 for Anglia University
Awarded 'Most Outstanding Student' in college.
Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist
Microsoft Certified Professional