Curriculum Vitae

Skills and Achievements

  • Ruby on Rails
  • Django
  • Symfony
  • Merb
  • Amazon EC2
  • Amazon S3
  • PHP5
  • PHP4
  • Drupal
  • REST
  • Author of the rails “acts_as_emailable” plugin
  • mySQL
  • JavaScript
  • CSS
  • HTML
  • Apache
  • Linux (Ubuntu)
  • Agile
  • Test Driven Development (TDD)
  • Behaviour Driven Development (BDD, RSpec)
  • XML / XSLT
  • SEO
  • Java
  • SVN
  • CVS
  • darcs
  • understanding of Perl

Professional Experience

March 2008 - Present

Contract RoR Developer - Rawnet.com

Creating a new site for Williams F1, for the new F1 season. Development using Ruby on Rails and RSpec. Main responsibilities including working on a bespoke CMS, and creating a front and back end for a video/photo/audio multimedia uploading and sharing solution. Also creating a micro site for specific users featuring an AJAX driven user interface.

July 2007 - March 2008

Contract PHP/Symfony Developer - Britfilms.tv

Developing an entirely new social networking application.

December 2005 - July 2007
Web Developer – uSwitch.com / UpMyStreet.com

At Upmystreet.com I have increased my knowledge of advanced, object oriented PHP, and mySQL. The entire site is object oriented. I have also learnt to use CVS version control. Each member of the development team writes code on their own machine, and then commits to a CVS server before staging the work.
I have two main responsibilities at Upmystreet.com. Firstly, I run daily tasks such as data updates and editorial changes. Secondly, I take charge of a selection of the larger projects. The most recent of which was to re-write a section of the site to use XML feeds and AJAX to display maps and plot points on them.
More recently, we have started using the python framework Django, and Ruby on Rails which greatly improves productivity. In April I created a rails interface for non-tech staff to upload data updates to the database without having to bother the developers. This made use of REST based resources, which passed import tasks onto backgrounDRB process. For the much of the final 4-6 months I was part of a team tasked with creating an entirely new section of the site, tying together the immense postcode data with social networking and local area elements. We used Django to do this, serving XML to an XSLT templating engine.
I gained more commercial experience at upmystreet.com. It is a sub division of a much larger company (uswitch.com) with over 200 people in the offices.

September 2005 - Present
Freelance Web Developer – Various Sites

In September 2005 I started freelance development work on evenings and weekends. I have now worked on a number of different, and interesting projects from which I have learnt a great deal. I taught myself to use Wordpress and Moveable Type, both as blogging tools and as content management systems. I have also learnt to code in Ruby on Rails, which I now use whenever possible. I recently created www.threehundredpixels.com using Ruby on Rails.
Working as a freelancer has been an excellent lesson in self management. I believe I am now much better equipped to work under my own steam. It has taught me more of the project management side of web development.

March 2003 – December 2005
Web Developer / Programmer – Moneynet.co.uk

At www.moneynet.co.uk I have gained an understanding of the commercial side of web design, from pay per click traffic to cost per click/application/month advertising.
I have been trained in various techniques of Search Engine Optimization such as xml site maps, RSS feeds, logical directory structure, etc. I have also learned how to build sites to the new standards set by the Disability Discrimination Act. This involves omitting all tables, and using just style sheets and div tags.
I have built an in-house development server running Apache, PHP and mySQL which is used by all staff to check pages before they are signed-off to go live.
I also built a multi-threaded cross network content management system from the ground up in Java and XML, to automate the attachment of advertisements to pages, and backing up of the site. This consists of client applications which communicate to a central server application on the development server via RMI. However, this was later replaced with a Drupal system, due to the maturity of Drupal, and the community support.
When I first started at Moneynet the site was completely static. I have supervised the re-writing of the entire site in PHP, XML and mySQL. All pages are dynamic on the in-house server, and created automatically as static for uploading. All results pages are completely object orientated, using IO classes to read from the database, control classes to manage sets of results, and results objects themselves to populate HTML tables.
I had to consistently produce high quality code to tight commercial deadlines since joining the company. I also gained management experience since taking on two trainee developers in March 2005.

Education

2000 - 2002
London Guildhall University - BSc Computing and Information Systems

Specialised in Java. Also covered UML, HTML, Assembly programming, Artificial Intelligence/Fuzzy Logic.
Left in year 2 due to financial reasons.

1998 - 2000
Esher College

A-levels in maths, economics and english language

1993 - 1998
Hampton Community College

12 GCSEs at grade C and above

References

Available on request