Backend engineer and intrapreneur who values building top quality software with others using open source and social coding practices.

Hobbies & Side Projects

  • Audio books (non-fiction and Sci-Fi/Fantasy)
  • Squash
  • Homelab. Currently a HP Gen8 Microserver. Thinking about some network hardware. Either something integrated like a Cisco 890ISR or go mad with some Ubiquiti gear.
  • Oasis - A service to create services via REST. This was written mainly to enjoy some Ruby. A colleague also asked me how I might refactor the domain model in lashd/mirage and this project is me thinking out loud.
  • Nand2Tetris - Building a Modern Computer from First Principles. I’ve finished part 1, which is Chapters 1-6, which covers the hardware components.

Professional and Voluntary Achievements

(by organisation, in approx. chronological order, most recent first)

Ovo Energy (6 month contract/current)

Greenfield data platform

  • On the job software engineering training for former database engineers.
  • Built a Kafka Connect based pipeline to migrate from SQL Server based data warehouse to Google BigQuery.
  • Maintained Google Cloud and Kubernetes based infrastructure, with Prometheus/Grafana for monitoring and alerting.
  • GDPR compliance work.

BSkyB/Sky (5 years)

Real-time data platform

  • Lead engineer building Sky’s strategic data collection library Sky Tags, bringing consistency to analytics and ad-tech integrations and enabling Sky to collect its own digital data.
  • Built a real-time data pipeline, using Kafka, Spark, and Druid, to ingest, enrich, and make available data collected from Sky Tags and legacy data warehouses for self-service BI and recommendations.
  • Built a customer segmentation service, using Scala and Akka, which provides boolean responses to customer and device segment membership queries and lists segments for a customer or device by id, using Kafka as a backing store. This has enabled specific targeting to customers with messaging and offers.
  • Data modeling and schematization of Sky’s raw analytical data using Avro and a schema registry service, enabling a continuous delivery approach to managing data across Sky.
  • Maintained on-prem hardware, including networks, using bespoke configuration management tooling and system administration.
  • Composed an internal compute and object storage cloud by deploying Docker, Mesos, Marathon, Minio, and Spark, on top of on-prem hardware.
  • Prototyped a hybrid cloud approach by extending the on-prem analytics pipeline to AWS.

Edge Services

  • Migrated edge routing to a self-service model, saving vendor support costs, increasing developer autonomy, and enabling the re-launch of Sky.com.
  • Implemented HTTPS across Sky.com.
  • Substantial work on Akamai configuration.

Sky.com

  • Re-platformed Sky.com from OpenCMS to polyglot micro-services. Examples of sites are https://contactus.sky.com, https://diagnostics.sky.com, https://www.sky.com.
  • Built a channel masthead, which is the channel branded header and footer of Sky.com. Demo page: http://masthead.sky.com/demo/sky-atlantic.
  • Built a continuous delivery pipeline with parallel end-to-end tests in every browser/device including visual regression testing using screenshot comparison.
  • Worked extensively with Heroku and AWS services.

Sky Graduate Bootcamp

  • Built a career management tool using Ruby on Rails.

Bravo Fleet (5 years; voluntary role)

  • Prototyped a new CMS using PHP and CodeIgnitor.
  • Built a new landing site, with vBulletin RSS feeds integrated.
  • Added several simple features to CMS, such as message of the day.
  • Implemented a new look and feel to CMS.
  • Managed infrastructure via cPanel and databases via phpMyAdmin.