Jan 2016 – Mar 2018 · 2 yrs 2 mos

• I became CTO in January 2016, leading the full technical function for an Ed‑Tech business specialising in school engagement and safeguarding. My remit covered technical strategy, product delivery, reporting, and long‑term infrastructure planning. A key achievement during this period was my role in the successful acquisition of The Contact Group by Iris Software Ltd in March 2018. I contributed to technical due diligence, business and financial analysis, and supported the wider sale process. Alongside leadership responsibilities, I stayed hands‑on with technology. I helped drive a modernisation of our products and migrating front‑ends to ReactJS, evolving our APIs toward a microservices architecture on .NET Core, and expanding our use of Azure and AWS. I also led the team’s adoption of Azure DevOps, improving delivery speed and reliability through stronger CI/CD practices. These efforts helped position the company for a successful exit and set the foundation for a more scalable, modern product suite.

Nov 2013 – Dec 2015 · 2 yrs 1 mo

• I started working for the Contact Group at the end of 2013 working within an Agile team on their main core products that includes Call Parents. The role involves several hats, including hands-on-development, designing and implementing a new micro-service styled architecture for supporting a variety of front-end clients that include mobile and web applications. There is also a heavy element of product backlog management, feature life cycle management, liaison with support and QA staff. I have also contributed with others to move the business to a more agile style of development with reasonable amount of success.
• I use predominantly the Microsoft stack of technologies (.NET Core/471/ASPNET) as well as a variety of front-end technologies (HTML/CSS/JavaScript/React), as well as other technologies such as (NGINX/RabbitMQ/Azure/AWS).

Nov 2012 – Oct 2013 · 11 mos

• I took over architect responsibilities for the company which has expanded my role which involved senior management meetings and future development strategy. I led a small development team and was involved in product planning. I helped coordinate our azure provision.
• The company was acquired by Advanced Health and Care in October 2013.

Feb 2011 – Oct 2012 · 1 yr 8 mos

• My work at Plain began with building a Silverlight 4 client for the Odyssey product which is hosted in the cloud with Windows Azure. I was also tasked to improve the continuous integration process within the development team. I also took a lead on the the Pathfinder product which utilised Umbraco CMS, ASP.NET 4, JavaScript, HTML and SQL Server. From May 2012, I managed the prototype design of the JavaScript Single Page Applications using KnockoutJS to demonstrate integration possibilities for clinical content delivery using REST. These services sit in front a suite of C# libraries which can also be accessed by WCF, hosted on Windows Azure.
• The team employed SOLID design principles and had a heavy use of patterns including MVVM, MVC, variants of MVP and other classic design patterns. During my time at Plain the use of TDD became more prevalent. I also managed a small team of developers remotely using Skype and Go-To-Meeting.
• During my continuous integration and agile work, I used Team Foundation Server 2010. Adapting the work flow processes in TFS is helping to facilitate a more integrated team where information is easily accessible and utilises existing technologies to reduce retraining. I set up and maintain the company's build server which uses TeamCity.

Mar 2009 – Jan 2011 · 1 yr 10 mos · Birmingham, United Kingdom

• This company is a software house focusing on document indexing and management software as well as a variety of custom solutions tailored predominantly to public sector clients. Initially brought in to sure up the C# skill base within the company, I was tasked to work on a combination of proof of concept demonstrations based on Microsoft’s Silverlight 3/4 and a collection of ASP.Net based expenses systems for the Welsh Assembly and the House of Commons.
• During the last six months at Folding Space, I was working in a small team where I lead the design on a new multi-tiered architecture for the document management system product. This utilised a combination of WCF fronted components composed of standard patterns using a variety of frameworks including Castle Windsor and NHibernate (FluentNHibernate).
• My role was a senior developer working with a development lead to task and design new features for a variety of products previously described. I had little direct contact with customers or clients. During my time I also experimented with a variety of other technologies relating to continuous integration such as build servers like Team City. I also had brief exposure to content management systems such as Umbraco.

Mar 2008 – Jul 2010 · 2 yrs 4 mos · Homeworker

• Initially approached to help with knowledge transfer within the NRKE development team, I have continued to give technical advice on design and assist with the implementation of new features of their website. I have primarily been involved in extending user functionality on their portal web site and enhancing the reliability of the site's search mechanism, amongst a host of other changes. Technologies used are ASP.NET 2.0 framework, SQL Server 2005, and aggregation & syndication with other websites using RSS/Atom/XML. I took on the contract additional to my permanent employment to diversify my technical knowledge. The work involved working remotely with the occasional meeting on site.

Mar 2005 – Mar 2009 · 4 yrs · Worcester, United Kingdom

• My main role at Scout was developing a new software framework of their core business product which serves the social housing sector. My duties have involved designing a multi-tiered framework of loosely coupled components that can be tailored to differing client’s requirements. The solution is fully object orientated, based on Microsoft .NET 2.0/3.5, and utilising a variety of frameworks including Spring and NHibernate. The solution is now actively used on five live sites, an example of which is https://www.pinpoint.org.uk/.
• I took a lead role in designing five of the ten components and overseeing the design on the entire framework. The company uses Enterprise Architect as its design tool. My duties also included developing business logic and unit testing in two further components. I focused on the SMS and Data imports (SQL Server 2000/05/08) for many of our client’s sites, which exposed me extensively to XML and XSLT technologies. The initial development, done in conjunction with a team based offshore, produced interesting challenges and an overall good experience for me.
• Apart from my development duties, I also had account management responsibilities for two clients over four month periods mainly in a system analysis style role. This would involve client visits and demonstrations to a wide variety of individuals from developers, IT implementers and senior management.
• The company was renamed Housing Partners Ltd after I left the organisation (http://www.housingpartners.co.uk/)

Sep 2001 – Feb 2005 · 3 yrs 5 mos · Birmingham, United Kingdom

• Initially my role at Isis was as a web developer working in small teams, typically of two to five people. My role involved working on business-to-business web solutions in the knowledge exchange, operational research and brewing industry, predominantly using ASP, ASP.NET (.NET 1.0) and SQL Server 2000 technology.
• Shortly after joining, I began working with the “at the time” new Microsoft.NET framework, primarily using C#. Along with a few others we were instrumental in bringing that technology to project delivery within the company, focusing on a variety of websites including an e-commerce site which was later bespoked and spun off into another company.
• In the last eighteen months working with Isis, I was given increased responsibility which included managing development tasks for other developers and account management of two clients.
• The company was renamed http://is2.co.uk/ after I left the organisation.

Oct 2000 – Sep 2001 · 11 mos · Borehamwood, United Kingdom

• I was enrolled onto Marconi’s Graduate Recruitment program with the role of Software Engineer. I worked on several prototype projects, mostly intranet based, with a two to three month timescale. These predominantly used ASP, Visual Basic, COM, SQL Server 7 technologies.
• As part of my professional development program, I underwent a series of training courses including C, C++, Java language courses as well as UML and OO design. I left Marconi due to well-publicised job insecurity and limited future career opportunity.