tl;dr Inefficiency troubles me; my ambition is to further our digital frontier by pushing the boundaries of interaction between people and machines. I obsess over the details of cross-discipline business challenges, leveraging my skill set through a pragmatic outlook, and always willing to step outside the bounds of my role to achieve harmony. You'd want me in your team as a catalyst for productivity, to use my leagues of experience in Agile development or resourcefulness and enthusiasm for cutting clean code and orchestrating forward-thinking and maintainable technical architecture.
Fitch Ratings' challenge was presented to me very simply: they were losing a painstaking volume of web traffic to their largest competitor Bloomberg. Partnered with web agency Appnovation to architect and develop a solution to index new ratings and announcements by Fitch so that they would benefit from every surge of attention. This also involved surfacing 100,000's of ratings actions and non-ratings commentaries in a way that users and search engine crawlers could discover content easily and accurately.
Accepted a pivotal role in the Financial Markets division to conquer a compliance gap impacting 14% of the multinational bank's trade volume under upcoming MiFID II regulation. Build involved pre- and post-trade transparency in a new data capture and retention platform. Worked with geographically distributed colleagues in locations like London, Singapore, Bangalore, Hong Kong, and New York, involving travel between. Took on Scrum Master responsibilities, able to track and improve velocity over 4x in our team and adjacent teams, creating a landmark achievement that would come to direct Agile development in our division. Still contributed heavily hands-on full cycle, React + Redux UI, Java back-end, bare metal servers. A knack for tackling many of our complex problems, such as FSM sequencing in asynchronous real-time, NLP using PEG, full-stack event traceability. Also took ownership of our release cycle, notorious for its intricacies in this industry where software regulation extends to test strategy and executive accountability. Most importantly, delivered the platform on time as well as a series of subsequent optimistic milestones.
Took the opportunity to join EDF Energy's Blue Lab, an innovation outfit embedded in their Hove campus that operated like a start-up incubator. Worked as a floating technical resource on numerous rapid prototyping projects at various stages, guided by information radiators and RAG reports. Completed both solo and team builds, full cycle, with an all-you-can-eat AWS infrastructure. Mobile-first development using Angular to take advantage of its tie-ins with RxJS and Observables, on a serverless architecture. Seized the chance to introduce recurring developer retrospectives to unite bright minds and promote reuse and hardening of implemented solutions. This evolved into a growing ecosystem of mathematical libraries and components that revolved around calculating energy generation and consumption, and pattern analysis.
Started a new venture by bringing across the core team from Affio. Business modelled on a blue sky session shifting focus to a software-as-a-service engine for legal process automation. Acted in a technical executive capacity, as well as hands-on, to produce workflow automation targeted at law firms with aspects of machine learning. Test-drove a Node.js back-end using the HAPI server framework. With two developers, we delivered an alpha release to market within three months. Worked closely with customers to shape new features and integrations. Successfully anticipated strong traction within mobile web accessibility for the legal sector. Lethargic legal market left us with a shortfall in funds to bootstrap the company. I departed on good terms after burnout, opting not to proceed with investor funding.
Entered a small fully-distributed team to build a legal technology product using a MEAN stack to tackle legal self-publishing. The vision here was to improve slow legal processes by giving consumers more control. Consulted initially to architect the tech stack drawing on my experience in financial technology. Following a successful consulting period, product reached alpha, and joined the team on a permanent basis. Adopted a tech lead role to add new features and deployed a public beta for the Affio Will product. Later planned and executed a user interface overhaul to respond to real customer data. Migrated codebase to ES2015 before growing the team. Stepped into a hands-on CTO role following a resignation on the board. Downsized the team. Shipped the Affio Will product out of beta. Introduced end-to-end tests across the stack and produced more complex features. Worked with angel investors to bring the product to market, shaping a business that disrupted the legal sector.
Joined the Engineering & Shared Services division of the Tier 1 Investment Bank, which boasts £1Billion IT operation globally. Directed development of a greenfield platform, with internal shared services and tooling. Collaborated closely with Head of Architecture and Head of the division to realise a migration to HTML RIAs and Node services and tooling. Sought on a largely advisory basis to overcome challenges driving changes in a titan infrastructure, building forward-thinking solutions and underpinning from an extensive front-end background. And promoting best-practice in a large organization drawn from my background in open source software. Constant focus on compliance and security protocols on a global scale.
Part of the Marketing & Acquisition team at one of Europe's largest eGaming and sportsbetting operators. Led the front-end development of a handful of real-time data web applications in an Agile environment. Tasked with developing 'best-of-breed' acquisition products, consisting of bleeding-edge technologies like JavaScript asynchronous modularity architecture (AMD + MVC) and WebSockets, as well as building autonomous production packages for continuous integration (CI). Heavy focus on mobile-first development cycles utilizing responsive design.
Building and maintaining bespoke consumer-facing, branded web applications for dynamic e-commerce, media marketing, and data management. A grand finale reflecting an extremely progressive year for my career, leading large teams of developers on exciting, fast-paced projects for household-name brands and organisations. Working entirely with cutting-edge development standards and libraries, structuring and coding scalable web applications for highly exposed brands, including mobile device compatibility.
Exciting opportunity to develop in a strict Agile working environment. Leading front-end build of the Google Think project with a small team of developers between London, New York and San Francisco, involving management directly with Google executives. Developing to perfection to create a global-facing campaign, implementing new-standards coding practices and (mobile) compatibility for the latest technologies.
Webby-award-winning digital agency; working with a variety of web developers integrating new web standards into existing web platforms and services, as well as starting entirely new projects. Enthralling challenges for incorporating latest web practices throughout the agency, and an innovative approach to business activity.