Open Heart Nerdery

Core Skills

  • ASP.NET - WebForms and MVC

    Includes experience working with 3rd party controls

  • Object-Oriented Design and Programming (with .NET 2.0-4)

    Appreciation of fundamentals such as encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism

  • SQL Server

    Database design and implementation, including stored procedures

  • Web Services

    Experience consuming third APIs & also experience of creating services for customer integration

  • Web Front-End Programming

    XHTML, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript

  • Test-Driven development

    Test-First approach where possible with a preference for the NUnit framework

Experience

  1. Senior Developer Bizfitech

    June 2015 - Present

    I work on product development at Bizfitech, writing C# with ASP.NET MVC & Web API

    • Bizfitech are a financial technology startup within the Blenheim Chalcot group.

  2. Web Applications Developer Fish Media

    August 2013 - May 2015

    I rejoined Fish Media to help with .NET development

    • My core responsibility on my return to Fish Media was to help out on an inherited codebase. During my time here, I:
      • Gradually performed substansial refactoring across an aging codebase. This allowed the code to stay fresh against fast-changing requirements and also enabled the project to take on modern coding standards whilst maintaining the functionality of previous
      • Introduced unit testing to the project - enabling greater confidence in refactoring code
    • Help and support with introducing new techniques into the company coding such as the use of CSS pre-processors (both SASS and Less)

  3. Developer Collstream

    August 2010 - August 2013

    I joined Collstream when the development team was small at 3 developers in size. Within my first year the company grew to 7 software developers and 1 dedicated database administrator. I work within the "core platform" team where I'm responsible for knowing our web platform inside out.

    • I worked across 6 different web applications
    • Built several responsive, AJAX driven interfaces to the specification of various senior developer and product owners
    • I was responsible for building two SOAP-Based web services to provide functionality for our customers to integrate their own applications with our services
    • Lead the web development of a new product within the company; a system for creating and scheduling bulk automated telephone call campaigns
      • Liason with the lead "Backend" developer of the product which included involvement in overall system architecture and co-authoring service contracts
      • Consideration, design and evolution of the system to handle busy periods of user activity
    • I was also responsible for managing our IIS servers which includes:
      • Management of Web Application deployments in our test and production environments
      • Management and installation of SSL certificates
    • Wrote a Powershell script to automate the creation and configuration of the all the companies web applications within IIS 7+.
      • Enables our entire web platform to be created and configured and ready to browse, from a single command, within 1 minute
    • Authored automated unit tests & acceptance test suites for all our web applications

  4. Quality Assurance Chemistry Digital

    May 2010 - August 2010

    I worked at Chemistry Digital for a short period yet gained exposure and experience to areas of the software development cycle that I had not previously had the opportunity to get involved with.

    • Introduced Selenium as a tool that drastically reduced manual effort of a frequent testing cycle
    • Worked closely with an Account Manager for the outsourced project to deliver estimates and progress reports to the client
    • As part of my career development plan, I was part of a "SiteCore" CMS training course wherein I had to sit a certification exam for "SiteCore .NET development" which I passed

  5. Web Developer Risborrow Information Systems Ltd

    January 2008 - May 2010

    This was my first commercial .NET role. Risborrow provided bespoke web-based solutions for areas including vehicle hire, asset management and fleet management.

    • Earned sole responsibility for a web application that used for tracking finances and comparing expenses
      • Involved travelling to and being a key part of customer meetings specifically being responsible for gathering requirements
    • Became a key developer within our flagship vehicle hire web application, pioneering the use of AJAX within our development team.
    • Working with the Product Manager, I worked exclusively on developing a bespoke mobile application for fleet management to run on Windows Mobile 6.5. The data collected by this app would then be presented via an ASP.NET web application
      • Had to design and implement a workflow that permitted "store and forward" behaviour that enabled an engineer to work in areas with no, or very little, cell reception.

  6. Web Applications Developer Fish Media Ltd

    February 2006 - December 2008

    This was the start of my web development career. I worked alongside the senior developer and the two company directors. The web sites were written using Classic ASP.

    • Independently created two brand new public-facing web sites that are still in use today
    • Responsible for converting pure Photoshop designs into XHTML that met Strict W3C validation depending on the project
    • Met cross-browser requirements of time, with a requirement to render correctly and be functional in IE6, IE7 Opera and Firefox

Education

  1. BSc (Hons) Computer Science (1st) Staffordshire University Stafford Staffordshire

    2005 - 2007
    Graduation Prize for "Most Outstanding Project on a Computing Award"
    • MCSD 70-480 Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3
    • MCTS 70-528 .NET Framework 2 - Web-based Client Development
    • MCTS 70-536 .NET Framework 2 - Application Development Foundation
    • MCTS 70-516 .NET Framework 4 - Accessing Data
    • MCTS 07-513 .NET Framework 4 – Service Communication Applications
    • .NET Developer Certification for Sitecore CMS 6.2