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Experience

2006 – Present WAVE2 MEDIA SOLUTIONS

I currently work as a full-time software developer, working closely with a small team producing a suite of publishing software for well known newspaper and magazine companies. My team engage in a number of agile programming techniques, such as test-driven development and regular morning stand-ups, to maximise productivity. I have experience maintaining various version control systems and a continuous integration server. I work with various J2EE technologies, including OpenEJB, JBoss and Spring. I also regularly develop in C++ (Windows and Mac), Adobe Flex and PHP as the supporting languages for our products.

Since 2009, I have been leading a project to develop a highly customisable e-commerce Web application for a number of existing clients. The project is built on Spring Roo, and powered by Hibernate and Lucene. It is the first of our projects to move from our traditional ad-hoc Ant/Eclipse configuration to a Maven build environment.

During my time at Wave2, I have used my close relationship with open source communities to provide tools for improving our collaboration efforts with a U.S. sister company. I spent time in Boston working with the developers on another Spring MVC project. I also set up internal mailing lists, an internal bug tracking tool, and improved on our Subversion version control configuration to make our projects easier to develop as a distributed effort.

2004 - 2005 GILLETTE ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY CENTRE

I worked at Gillette for a one year industrial placement during University. My other roles in this company varied from providing on-site computer support, to problem-solving and maintaining the facilities with the other members of the I.T. Team.

The skills I gathered in this company were put into practical use when I worked with the Future Technologies department to build a specialised Intranet search engine for my University dissertation. The project was built on the J2EE platform (EJB2 and JSP), and the Lucene engine. I also gained some experience with the OpenOffice remoting API and JPedal/PDFBox libraries for converting arbitrary documents into XML formats suitable for use on the Web front-end.

2001 - 2004 BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO

As part-time employment during my time at College and University. I was dealing directly with customers and exercising direct marketing strategies. I was often required to take responsibility for opening and closing branches, and my shifts varied from working amongst a team to managing the store  on my own. During the summer of 2003 I also assisted with the opening of a new Blockbuster Video branch at Chesham, which included setting up the store computer system.

2002 ENGAGE

My work at Engage (a sister company of AltaVista) was primarily to log all the computer assets in the company building, and to design and produce an Access database to be used by the company’s finance department for tracking and auditing. To simplify future maintenance, I also produced a simple desktop application in Visual Basic for logging new assets and producing spreadsheets.

2001 ALTAVISTA

I used my knowledge of Cisco systems from a course I attended during College to configure various Cisco routers, and assist a team in relocating the hardware to a new physical location.

Training Courses

Adobe SDK training course: Attended as a sponsored event for Adobe partner companies. I was given in-depth training into the Adobe development framework, and integration with Adobe formats such as PDF and Flash Web publishing.

Cisco systems: basic training course arranged by West Herts College. Coupled with my experience at Altavista this provided me with early experience with networking concepts and Cisco hardware.