I began web development as a hobby at the age of 15, teaching myself everything I needed to know to build engaging and interactive websites and forums. In 2007 I became employed as a web developer which soon became a career that I found creative and that I had a great passion for.
I really enjoy the challenges and sense of fulfilment that software development provides. Keeping up-to-date with new technologies and processes to learn how they could help with current and up-coming projects increases my knowledge and skill set continuously. I strongly push for projects and their infrastructures to be efficient, scalable and intuitive to the best of my ability.
Experience
IntelliCentrics 2018 to present
With teams in Texas, Boston, Costa Rica, and the UK, building healthcare systems for the US, UK, China, and Taiwan, working at IntelliCentrics would prove to be a complete change of scale and pace. My full-stack skill set was immediately focused to take advantage of my Angular experience in my initial role as Senior Front-End Developer. As I worked closely with a UK-based team supporting the development of legacy Angular projects, the new micro-service platform was in early conception. The front-end codebase of the new platform uses the Nx monorepo build system with Angular - an architectural pattern that was new to me and so I was eager to get involved.
As a brief detour from the typical stack, I setup a React Native project boilerplate in TypeScript, closely followed by the development of an application which was based on the boilerplate and was published to both the iOS App Store and Android Play Store.
The UK-based Lead Front-End Developer and Lead Architect took me under their wings and aided my personal progression. In December 2019 we flew to the Texas office which was hosting a week long 'UI Summit' where each of the key front-end leaders would gather to formulate a detailed micro front-end library architecture to compliment the micro-service back-end and enable team structures based on each vertical slice of the platform. Around this time, I progressed to become one of two Lead Front-End Developers in the company. With direction from the Lead Architect I was tasked to build the PKCE authentication library, which every application has since implemented to authenticate users and authorise API access through the gateway. While I was still heavily involved with developing the codebase, I was also leading, mentoring and on-boarding for both UK and US-based teams.
We developed some internal tools specifically for developers, product owners, quality auditors, and the user experience teams:
- Training: providing teams with training resources, including tutorial videos, presentation slides, and practical exercises, each of which we had created ourselves.
- Sandbox: for each team to provide interactive proof-of-concept examples of their reusable components.
- Design system: providing thorough documentation and interactive examples of the foundational components.
I then took technical leadership of the UX team tasked with building foundational components, applying a strict open source style discipline to deliver semantically scoped feature sets and customisation, enabling developers to rapidly deliver contextual implementations.
Following managerial changes of the company I have since become a Front-End Technical Lead, with responsibilities generally around sprint refinement and team mentoring, alongside ongoing work on improving the CI/CD pipelines, upgrades, architectural documentation, and any other front-end topics. Each week the technical leads host a meeting with all front-end developers to share any globally interesting updates and to give everyone the opportunity to highlight any issues or topics which are impacting them.
Synextra 2015 to '18
I left Ingenium for an exciting opportunity to work for a startup company based in Trafford Park as their Lead Software Developer. Synextra is a cloud IT solutions company that provides their customers with virtual hosted desktops, internet, VoIP and bespoke dedicated server configurations with hosting in 2 major data centres. I took over development of an existing incident reporting system that was built for a client that owns a number of hospitals. There were many potential software customers and our own in-house systems to develop so I set about developing a boilerplate for all future applications. The boilerplate was written in TypeScript and has a NodeJS API and an Angular UI the boilerplate has many features baked in to it such as user / authentication management, file uploading and secure sharing, real-time notifications, message queues and an advanced tag and attributes system.
The boilerplate has since powered many applications such as a helpline system for a charity that deals with the prevention of suicidal youths. This application collates SMS, email and call narratives per client in a thread with the ability to reply to the client, edit details of the client and add notes, outcomes and progression. All clients are anonymous to the Hopeline agent until there is a need to inform emergency services at which point the agent can reveal the client's contact information to pass on. This system uses sockets to inform the agent of real time events such as a queue of clients awaiting a response, clients assigned to other agents and other agents currently replying to a client.
We have also used the boilerplate to begin development of our cloud customer portal. I have used a number of technologies and languages to do such things as provision servers and manage users in Active Directory. To combat scalability issues when dealing with a large amount of data or a potentially large amount of processes I have utilised message queues to maintain consistent control.
Ingenium IDS 2007 to '15
My career began as a web developer for Ingenium IDS working alongside the Head of IT and Development. Ingenium hosted CPD approved events for public sector workplace management while building up a database of high level public sector contacts. My first roles in this employment included designing and making websites and email campaigns for each event and developing an order system that would track everything from purchase orders and sales to scanning attendee badges for reporting. My role at the events as Technical Support Manager included setup of reception laptops that connected wirelessly to our event server that hosted a local version of the order system, setup of presentation laptops and helping speakers with any last-minute alterations.
As the company evolved I was promoted to Senior Web Developer and we developed a marketing system that would utilise the ever-growing public sector database to publicise our own events and saw an opportunity for a data-included public sector marketing tool. The company invested in 2 new members of the development team and a high end email campaign tool called PowerMTA and we started development of a system dubbed iServe that would later become the backbone to Ingenium. iServe enabled customers to query our database, import and query their own data, manage suppressions, send campaigns to query results, build dynamic surveys, track opens, clicks and forwards of sent campaigns and feedback with detailed and customisable reports. iServe gathered many highly regarded clients such as IBM, Oracle and Xerox. To publish iServe survey results and newly adopted online webinar events the company created a sub-brand titled iGov. I developed the iGov News website that hosts video presentations, survey results and public sector news articles. iServe continues it's development today and is capable of sending millions of emails each day.