Fintech Payments Company

Senior Software Developer

Ministry of Justice UK

Modernized and added major new features to a vital legacy Rails web application.

Performed major refactoring to speed up delivery of new features, improved monitoring, and built self-service tools for support staff.

Created a communication process between developers and domain experts, which sped up the delivery of features with complex rules due to fewer meetings and fewer bugs.

Skills developed: Ruby, AWS, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Domain-Driven Design

Software Engineering Consultant

OpenCorporates

Was promoted and given line management duties due to successful delivery of the first phase of a new data pipeline project.
The current role entails people management as well as hands-on development.
Supported and levelled up the team to face the challenges of a cloud transformation drive.
Played a key role in architecting the new cloud-based architecture and the migration strategy for the existing on-premise estate.

Tech Lead

Successfully lead the collaboration between the SRE and development teams, and data operations squad, to deliver the MVP for the new cloud-based data acquisition pipeline.
Drove company-wide adoption of realistic estimation during project planning and iterative delivery of value; trained the engineering team to split solutions into individually estimated components, and to use deep-dive investigations for more accurate estimates.
Was in charge of raising software development standards via training, mentoring, and process improvement.
Skill level-ups: Big data pipelines, Kafka, large-scale software design and project management, line management, proposal writing, remote working, Ruby, Rails, Linux servers, Docker

Senior Software Engineer

hireful (formerly EasyWeb Group)

Worked with Hireful's development team to improve their infrastructure.
Was responsible for revamping the entire infrastructure to make it meet the key goals of security, scalability, robustness, and cost-effectiveness.
Played a key role in the transition from a distributed-monolith architecture to a proper microservices architecture that could tolerate components failing without downtime or loss of user data.
Drove the change to vendor-managed services over self-managed servers to enhance security and robustness, while reducing management overhead.
Drove the change to the vendor-managed AWS Fargate service from instance-based ECS which used self-managed servers, which enhanced scalability, cost-efficiency, stability, robustness, and security.
Built a full CI/CD pipeline for all services in AWS using CodeBuild and CodePipeline.
Built a suite of well-tested, easy to use Python wrappers for Terraform.
Trained and mentored new DevOps / platform hires and evangelized test-driven and behaviour-driven development among the team.

Cloud Architect, AWS Specialist

Armakuni

Worked on the Comic Relief donations platform, which was designed and tested to accept at least 200 donations a second, and at least 800,000 donations in total for the Sport Relief 2018 telethon - a very difficult the scaling problem. Working on the microservice-based architecture, was able to enhance it to be able to handle new requirements, while improving test suite to be more stable during continuous integration and delivery runs, and have fewer transient errors.

Gained experience in maintaining and improving a continuous delivery pipeline managed by Concourse CI.

Worked on infrastructure, frontend, and backend, according to client-prioritised backlog.

Was involved in monitoring and maintaining the platform during the Sport Relief 2018 telethon event on TV.

Tech used: Ruby, Sinatra, JavaScript, Cloud Foundry, Concourse CI, Redis, MongoDB, Terraform, AWS

Hive | Centrica Connected Home

Was part of the Hive Camera development team, as they developed the Hive smart camera and platform.

Was part of both SRE/DevOps and development teams, and was responsible for disseminating SRE/DevOps culture into product team, allowing them to be independent and not be bottlenecked by a central SRE/DevOps team, while also implementing expert SRE/DevOps practices.

Was able to pick up the very complex shared platform tooling very quickly, using and extending it for product team, leading to becoming productive very soon after joining.

Spearheaded rewrite on infrastructure tooling to make it more flexible and remove repetitiveness of CloudFormation templates across organisation.

Was central to design and implementation of microservices architecture for hosting camera services.

Tech used: AWS, Puppet, Linux (Ubuntu) administration, Bash, Ruby, Python, Go, CloudFormation, CfnDsl, Packer, Jenkins

SRE Consultant

Imagination

Provided emergency development for a company whose previous Ansible developer departed abruptly.
Was able to hit the ground running, understand a very complex project, figure out the differences between several in-development branches, and start being productive right away.

Also provisioned a brand new infrastructure on a separate AWS account to help support a new event for their client. Was able to understand, run, debug, and fix infrastructure automation scripts within a very short amount of time.

Tech used: AWS, Ansible, Linux (Ubuntu) administration, Bash, Python, MySQL, CouchDB, LDAP,
CloudFormation, Packer, Jenkins

DevOps Consultant

Alliants

Consulted for Alliants Limited, a Ruby on Rails development consultancy, on integrating DevOps processes into their workflow.

Got buy-in from CTO, dev team, and clients, for a machine-image based immutable-server based pipeline with following features:
  ● creating build artifacts as entire machine images with all their dependencies baked in
  ● immutable server clusters getting replaced every deployment, thus reducing chance of drift from
      configuration management in version control
  ● letting developers deploy a branch to a new endpoint for testing
  ● zero-downtime green/blue deployments
  ● self-healing clusters which automatically replace non-functional backends with brand new ones
  ● easy scaling of clusters by using machine image to spawn new backends

Architected and developed this infrastructure, ported some existing applications to it. Got buy-in from one of Alliant's client to convince them to use this pipeline for their new application.

Have also helped them up security to servers, have added redundancy to existing infrastructure, and
trained their team to allow them to perform ops duties themselves, through documentation, instructional video, and automation.

Also had privilege of being mentored in consulting by CTO of Alliants.

Tech used: AWS, Ansible, Linux (RedHat, Ubuntu) administration, Continuous Integration & Delivery,
Ruby, Bash, PostgreSQL, Terraform, Packer, Jenkins, IPTables

The People's Operator

This role was split into 2 parts: first, carried out both web development and DevOps duties (January - June), and later on switched purely to performing only DevOps duties (June - October).

Had the privilege of working with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and Andrew McDonough, CTO of Tribesports, to develop a social network and fundraising platform, as the charitable arm of their ethical mobile phone network.

Working in an agile team, played an integral role in designing and developing a brand new social network from scratch, using Ruby on Rails, supported by PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch and Redis. Used and encouraged test-driven and behaviour driven development, code reviews to drive up code quality. Also played interim Scrum Master role for a few weeks during absence of actual lead developer.

Got buy-in for, championed, designed, and developed, infrastructure and deployment pipeline, using Ansible, Ruby, Bash, and Jenkins. Later, the infrastructure and all the apps had to be migrated from AWS to IBM SoftLayer due to legal requirements.

Had to rescue infrastructure from disaster where ⅓ of servers were brought down due to loss of service at SoftLayer. Due to use of configuration management, was able to recreate unavailable services on other parts of SoftLayer that were still available.

Tech used: Ruby, Rails, Bash, PostgreSQL, AWS, Continuous Integration & Delivery, SoftLayer, Elasticsearch, Ansible, Linux (RedHat, Ubuntu) administration, Vagrant, Networking, Jenkins, Nginx, Redis, Sidekiq, OpenVPN, IPSec, IPTables

Ruby on Rails Developer and DevOps Consultant

Salmon

Salmon Ltd was consulting for owners of Dulux paints to create a CMS with e-commerce functionality. Had to work to integrate Spree e-commerce package into existing CMS, allowing seamless flow from one site to the other. As the sole Ruby on Rails developer working on e-commerce component, was able to keep up with a team of 19 working on the rest of the site.

Was noted for always liaising with product owners to develop simplest solution that fulfilled the requirement at hand, and being "the git guru". Was involved in interviewing other Rails developers, including for when looking for replacement, and was told to be picky as "they have big boots to fill".

Also used Ansible to set up dependencies on development machines, which were Vagrant VMs running Ubuntu.

Tech used: Linux (Ubuntu) administration, Ansible, Vagrant, Ruby, Rails, Spree, Bash, MySQL, MongoDB, Maven

Backend Software Developer

Specialist in software development, architectural design, and engineering team leadership. Loves absolute simplicity, building dumb and easy to understand software that can be picked up and worked on by anyone.

Taplio

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