Curriculum Vitae

Important Note

I am not currently looking for a job; this document is provided for informational purposes only.

Profile

I am a skilled developer with a lot of experience designing and building reliable and scalable solutions on the Microsoft platform. I have worked in a wide range of projects and environments, from systems integration to media web sites, and am able to adapt to situations and apply new technologies very quickly.

I approach software development as an engineer, being pragmatic and making decisions based on evidence to ensure software ships on time with sufficient quality. I believe the ability of team members to work both individually and together is more important than using specific methodologies or practices.

My next role will be hands-on as my skills are in the design and implementation of software rather than non-technical management, and I would expect to be challenged and stretched by any role I take.

Skills

My primary technological skills are .NET and SQL Server development, with C# being my most proficient language. I excel at API design and development, and am adept at balancing concerns such as usability against scalability and security.

I have a thorough understanding of development paradigms such as object- and service-orientation, as well as functional, dynamic and meta-programming, and know when and how to choose between or combine them to solve problems.

In addition to development skills I am a good technical writer, having prepared many proposals and design documents throughout my career.

Career History

blinkbox Entertainment Ltd, Senior Development Lead (July 2007 – Present)

I led a team to design and build a scalable middle tier using a service-oriented architecture on the .NET platform. We made extensive use of design-time and runtime code generation to remove boiler-plate code like tracing and exception management, and used higher-order programming to centralise common functionality such as caching and data access.

My team also developed a Windows Workflow based distributed encoder which included process monitoring and recycling to work around memory leaks in third-party components. We developed custom workflow activities and runtime services to handle encoding of video in a reliable and scalable manner.

Netstore plc, Principal Consultant (Sept 2006 – July 2007)

My role involved working across a number of projects simultaneously, including architectural reviews, pre-sales work such as requirements gathering and proposal drafting, and performance tuning. I was the lead developer on a number of BizTalk 2006 proof-of-concept solutions and presentations for clients including the government and investment banks.

Although this job was varied and interesting, I spent a lot of time talking about technology rather than designing and implementing it. I realised that consulting was not what I wanted to do at this time in my career, and left to pursue a more technical role.

Charteris plc, Senior Developer (Jan 2005 – Aug 2006)

I worked on three integration projects consecutively; each lasting between three and nine months. One was based around Microsoft’s Connected Services Framework where we developed WS-* adapters to communicate with external systems. The others were based on BizTalk 2004, and included building custom pipeline components, and a finite state machine in the Rules Engine which enlisted in BizTalk transactions to reliably manage the state of processes.

Microsoft Ltd, Software Development Engineer in Test (Sept 2001 – Dec 2004)

Joining Microsoft after university I spent the first couple of years working in test automation and performance tuning on projects in the Solution Development Centre. Subsequently I worked as a test feature lead on two BizTalk 2004 projects, and in test governance on a BizTalk SWIFT messaging solution. I was part of the teams awarded the Services Team Excellence Award in both FY2004 and FY2005.

Education

MEng (Hons) First Class – Chemical Engineering, University of Nottingham