sheepCRM

sheepCRM (getsheep.co.uk) is a new flexible, hosted databases system that allows you to track and manage information from around your business. 

Sheep uses the latest technology (MongoDB, Redis, Python, Django, Celery) hosted on Amazon's Cloud. Technology which brings tailor-made development to a new (low) price point.

Founder and CTO

Historic Futures Ltd

To make better products tomorrow, we must know where they come from today.

Historic Futures makes it possible for companies to collect and manage value chain data, from primary production to finished product and to communicate good practice to their customers.

* strategic management
* people management 
* delivering ISO 27001
* software architecture and design
* project and process management
* writing code

Interim Technical Director & Technology Consultant

Croftsware Ltd

Internet Consultancy
Ecommerce specialist
Senior Technical Hiring
Python, Django, MongoDB
Node, Redis

Virtual CTO

Driver Connex

driverconnex.com is a new mobile technology enabling a direct interface to your drivers

Cobini

Rapid prototyping and strategic consulting working 1:1 with the founder to test startup hypothesis.

Rangespan Ltd

Rangespan is an ecommerce startup enabling retailers to rapidly and profitably expand their selection.

My role was to design the bespoke software systems and to build the software team.

Starting, from literally a blank sheet, a team was hired and the systems were built and launched in six months.

In July 2011 I handed over to a full-time CTO.

Update (Summer 2012): This is a great article on the 10Gen site about Rangespan and their use of MongoDB: http://www.10gen.com/customers/rangespan

tags: python, django, flask, mongodb, mysql, ec2, restful web services, scrum, recruitment

Update (2014): Rangespan have now been acquired by Google.

Consultant

Torchbox Ltd

Technical Operations Director aka director in charge of getting stuff done. Organising people and projects in a fluid, fast moving and response organisation. Head of Drupal development.

--

Over 1000 days I brought significant change to Torchbox. The company had grown organically and successfully for seven years but had reached the point where further growth required a new structure to support it. The challenge - how do you add process without stifling innovation or limiting flexibility? My response: instrument the problem space then incrementally improve.

 - In the first three months the internal time tracking tool was rewritten to provide fine-grained project metrics. Real-time project profitability was then available at the task level.
 - I brought in Agile methodologies, both SCRUM and Kanban. 
 - Collaborative working and planning was made easier by adopting Google Docs. 
 - I created a single, simple, shared and decentralised planning tool: 'The Grid'. 
 - To review ongoing projects I developed the Stakeholder Review - time limited to 15 minutes we assembled all the project managers and directora and swept through every project providing an instant status snapshot. 
 - Inspired by The Wire (HBO tv series) Red Ball sessions were created to provide in-depth analysis of projects which were either in trouble or of high strategic value.

I also fulfilled the role of HR director. I owned the recruiting and disciplinary process, eventually hiring 40% of the current staff. I wrote policies where they were missing. Performance and pay reviews were standardised.
 
Torchbox adopted Drupal shortly after I joined. This was a strategic growth area for the company which I grew to 40% of revenue within 2 years.

Technical Operations Director

Amazon.co.uk

I joined Amazon as a software engineer and have increased my responsibility year on year. I now manage three teams of software engineers. I have responsibility for Amazon's retail catalog systems (the databases of product which you see while browsing the site). Amazon has thousands of data providers sending millions of records. These are parsed, improved, reconciled and published to the website.

Responsibilities
- 24x7 operations of catalog processing software
- Development of next generation processing capabilities
- Migration from legacy to current systems
- People management (23 people across three teams and two countries)

Senior Software Development Manager

Plus Design Limited

I was employed by a program which sought to bring innovate technology from universities to small businesses. My role was to bring internet technology to oil field monitoring. Pressure and temperature sensors can tell you a great deal about the size of your oil reservoir. The sensors which collect this data usually store it on site and the data is collected and analysed only when an engineer is visiting the the site. My system used internet technology to bring the large amounts of data back automatically to the analysts desk. I designed and built two systems (1 in East African and 1 in the North Sea), these opened up new revenue streams for the company.

Plus Design has since been acquired by QuantX and the systems I began has been developed into a product called Extrak [http://www.quantx.com/pdf//QX_Extrak.pdf]

Software Engineer

Founder sheepCRM (getsheep.co.uk): event, membership and fundraising management in the cloud

Specialties: building web-scale, high performance web systems
 - RESTful web services
 - agile, scrum, kanban
 - python, django, node.js
 - mongodb, redis, mysql
 - building and adapting processes
 - building technical teams

Taplio

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