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About Me

I'm a hands-on Software & Data Engineer, and a pro-active, productive, self-starter

With over 15 years of experience in web technologies, Im a forward-thinking, enthusiastic, software craftsman, with a passion for developing quality, scalable, cloud native solutions to business problems.

I'm Happy to work either embedded in a team, for a fixed project, or as an individual working to a brief, and im Fully insured for all my work.

I've spent time working in start-ups, scale-ups, SME's and large enterprise companies, and thrive in a position where I can utilise all of my skillsets (Wearing many hats)

Download My CV

Back-end Engineering

Front-end Engineering

Data Engineering

Dev-ops & Infrastructure

Agile methodologies

Leadership & Team building

Languages

Python Shell GoLang Java/Kotlin ASP.NET C# HTML CSS JavaScript PHP SQL

Frameworks

Django Django Rest Framework Flask Tornado Angular Magento Wordpress Ansible Chef Fabric

IAAS

AWS Google Cloud Heroku

Tech

Git Shell Linux Docker Kubernetes Vagrant Nginx Apache gunicorn/uwsgi Jenkins Redshift BigQuery Mysql Postgres MariaDB Cloud Datastore MongoDB

Processes / concepts

Agile Scrum Kanban Extreme Programming (XP) TDD BDD CI CD Big Data Orchestration Configuration as code Delivery Pipelines Code Reviews Teaching Learning Mentoring Leading Pair Programming Unit testing Functional testing Integration testing API design Documentation driven design QA

Areas of expertise

Backend

  • Strong application development experience with Django Flask Tornado
  • RESTful API Driven applications Using Django Rest Framework TastyPy Flask-RESTful FastAPI
  • Strong familiarity working serverless with AppEngine Heroku AWS Lambda Functions Google Cloud Functions
  • Strong familiarity working with virtual machines on Virtualbox Amazon EC2 Google Compute Engine
  • Strong familiarity working with containers on Googles managed kubernetes Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Heroku
  • Task processing using Google Task Queue Celery SNS/SQS Rabbitmq Redis
  • Processing big and small data with Apache Spark Apache Airflow Pandas/Numpy Map Reduce AWS Athena
  • Data design/analysis, Whiteboarding, Pragmatic planning
  • Well versed in good design patterns, 12 factor, microservice architecture, scalable design, cloud patterns

Architecture/Infrastructure

  • Developing scalable cloud native applications
  • Experience with Cloud providers (IAAS/PAAS) AWS Google Cloud Heroku Digital Ocean
  • Strong familiarity with *nix systems Linux MacOS
  • Strong command line skills
  • Strong experience with Web Servers, including Nginx Apache Lighttpd uwsgi gunicorn
  • Experience with File/Mail Servers Samba FTP/SFTP SSHFS Postfix
  • SQL/NOSQL Databases & Warehouses Postgresql Mysql MongoDB Cloud Datastore Redshift BigQuery Aurora
  • Deployment tools/practices CI/CD docker zappa Serverless framework Fabric Shell scripting blue/green deployment canary deployment AB testing
  • Load testing with locustIO Apache Benchmarking tool (AB) Blitz.io
  • Monitoring/Reporting tools using Statsd Datadog Cloudwatch Grafana Graphite Stackdriver Sentry Looker
  • Configuration as code using Chef Ansible
  • Infrastructure as code using Terraform CloudFormation Elastic Beanstalk Serverless framework

Process & Practices

  • Version control using Git Mercurial SVN
  • Agile frameworks used Extreme Programming (XP) Scrum Kanban Scrumban
  • Test driven development (TDD)
  • Metric driven development (MDD)
  • Behaviour driven development (BDD), Using Selenium Gherkin Cucumber Appium
  • Software Craftsmanship
  • Business modelling & Domain Driven Design
  • Product focussed approach
  • Continuous Integration (CI), Using Jenkins CircleCI Travis GoCD Bitbucket pipelines Github actions
  • Continuous Delivery (CD), pipelines built with Jenkins CircleCI Bitbucket pipelines Github actions
  • Peer Review, Pair Programming, Mentoring
  • Regularly attend conferences keeping skillset up to date
  • Automation of testing/integration/deployment
  • Strong leadership skills and experience

Business

  • Experience building out new capabilities & revenue streams
  • Experience with StartUps, ScaleUps, SME's & Corporates #ManyHats
  • Data Visualisation with dash, redash, Looker
  • Technical Road maps, Backlog planning, grooming etc, estimation
  • Technical Hiring experience for CTO's, Backend, DevOps, QA, Scrum masters, junior, senior and lead engineering positions
  • Familiar with the Innovation, Incubation and Commercialisation stages of projects

Currently learning

  • Python's ayncio tools, ASGI, Starlette framework
  • Russian
  • Android development with Kotlin
  • Android/iOS development with react native
  • How to be the best version of myself

Experience & Education

2.5 Years 16-18
Team Lead, Games Services, Gamesys Ltd.
August 2016 - December 2018
Gamesys Ltd.

Heading up a team of Python developers, building and maintaining systems to support our games and players, using Django/Flask/Tornado on Google AppEngine, Container Engine, Compute Engine, and Flexible Environment, reporting and analytics with BigQuery and DataDog, relational and non-relational data in CloudSQL & DataStore, and a host of other products in Google's suite of cloud based tools being used.


Managing the product backlogs, co-ordinating with product owners and project managers, staff training, and review/assessment, recruitment of new staff, long term planning, requirements gathering, technical roadmap, working with other team leads to move the department forwards.

4 Months 2016
Senior Python developer, Games Services, Gamesys Ltd.
May 2016 - August 2016
Gamesys Ltd.

Helping to maintain and enhance a suite of products used for supporting and running games at scale on Facebook, Apple AppStore, GooglePlay and Amazon AppStore

3 Years 13-16
Lead Backend Developer & Devops Engineer, Scoota Ltd.
Jun 2013 - May 2016
Scoota Ltd.

Product development on a suite of Ad creation/serving tools, Initially working on the front-end (JavaScript SPA), but moving into the back-end (Django micro-service API's), and dev-ops (Ansible, Terraform on AWS)

Making use of a wide range of AWS tools and services, including EC2, ELB's, S3, CloudFront, Redshift, Elastic Transcoder, Kinesis, RDS and a whole bunch more.

2 Years 11-13
Full Stack Developer, Scoota Ltd.
Dec 2011 - Jun 2013
Scoota Ltd.

Involved in a lot of production work, high pressure, tight deadlines, quick turnarounds, mainly microsites, and campaign work. Written in Python, PHP, ASPX, HTML, CSS and Javascript.

2 Years 09-11
IT & Communications, British Design Innovation
Jan 2009 - Dec 2011
British Design Innovation

This was my Job during University, I was looking after Members, providing IT Support, looking after the Web/Mail/File Servers, improving the information architecture, and developing the internal business processes.

18 Years+ 2002+
Director / (Full Stack Developer), Shipit Ltd (Freelance)
Jan 2002 - Present
Shipit Ltd (Freelance)

From an early age I have been taking on freelance jobs, involving graphic design, web and app development, infrastucture and hosting for individuals and small companies. (E-Commerce sites, Microsites, Corporate sites, Blogs etc.)

N.B - Shipit Ltd incorporated 01/01/18, I was working as self-employed prior to that.
6 months 2021
Software & Data Engineer, Zilch
April 2021 - October 2021
Zilch, Risk & Data

Building and deploying a new microservice for their credit & risk decisioning, as well as creating their data platform and grass roots capabilities for data ingestion, modelling and management.

Infrastructure as code with terraform, hosted on AWS, ETL pipelines with python lambda functions and pyspark on AWS Glue, replication with AWS DMS, ELT with DBT and kleene.ai, reporting and visualisation with looker.

Web API with FastAPI, python 3.10 running in a container based architecture on ECS Fargate, all provisioned and managed with terraform

6 months 20/21
Software & Data Engineer, GFK
November 2020 - April 2021
GFK, NEWRON

Working with some of the best in-class engineers and data scientists to deliver products and insights through GFK's Market intelligence platform, taking data science insight and analysis, and turning it into automated, deliverable software products that end users can engage with.

Deploying algorithms and machine learning models onto a Kubernetes cluster, hosted on Google Cloud Platform, using graphQL, MLFlow, Python and data transformation using the ELT pattern inside postgres.

3 Months 2020
Sole Data Engineer, BCG DV
August 2020 - October 2020
BCG (DIGITAL VENTURES) LONDON, REPLICANT

Providing data engineering support for a validation sprint in the renewable energy space.

Working with Big data using Apache Airflow for orchestration, AWS for infrastructure, Fargate for long running container tasks (deployment/configuration with terraform), Lambdas for smaller tasks (deployment with serverless), Data Lakes on S3 (for storage), Athena + Redash (for BI and analytics), integrating data science and analytics jobs against the dataset on S3.

4 Months 2020
Sole Backend Engineer, ErnieApp
April 2020 - July 2020
ErnieApp

Taking over all backend engineering work, supporting the live iOS/Android applications, building out the companies data capabilities, Technical Hiring, Building out their BI platform for data insights, Helping to transition the engineering team into Scrum, building out and performing UI, integration & load testing, localisation

7 Months 19/2o
Senior Software/Data Engineer, Heycar UK
August 2019 - February 2020
Heycar UK

Helping the Scale-Up leave incubation and go rapidly through commercialisation steps, Recruitment of junior/senior data & software engineers, scrum master, & CTO.

Driving the initiative on data collection and best practices, building out a data lake & initial data pipelines, continued product development at pace, whilst also focussing on data capability.

3 Months 2019
Senior Python Engineer, BCG DV
June 2019 - August 2019
BCG (Digital Ventures) London, Heycar

Assisting with the multi-million pound launch of heycar.co.uk, ongoing product development work, load testing, Recruitment of backend Engineers, took over all backend work as incubation staff rolled off

3 Months 2019
Senior Software/Data Engineer, BCG DV
April 2019 - June 2019
BCG (Digital Ventures) London, Prophesea

Working on the final phase of a market predictions product for the shipping industry, combining my skills within data & software engineering to help bring together data scientists, engineers and product together for delivery. Working with some of BCG DV's best and brightest within a cross functional startup incubation team where it was "all hands on deck" all the time.

4 Months 18/19
Lead Engineer, Sainsburys Data Science
December 2018 - March 2019
J Sainsburys PLC

Working with the Data Science department as a whole, cross training data scientists in engineering, shaping process, implementing agile frameworks, individual tutoring, technical leadership and direction.

5 Months 2018
Senior Software Engineer, Sainsburys Replenishment team, Data Science
July 2018 - November 2018
J Sainsburys PLC

Working directly with data scientists and delivery managers to build on POC's and ETL Pipelines, then productionising proven algorithms for various areas of the business, from warehouse and in-store stock replenishment, to checkout optimisation.

1 Month 2018
Senior Software Engineer, Sainsburys Apps team (Android)
June 2018
J Sainsburys PLC

Continuing to build, release and support the Sainsburys Groceries Android application, building out a CI Pipeline for continual, automated release, refactoring the legacy codebase.

4 Months 2018
Senior Software Engineer, Sainsburys Alexa project
February 2018 - May 2018
J Sainsburys PLC

Designing & Building the Sainsburys voice shopping Alexa skill, from initial development, systems design/integration to internal and closed group customer trials. Dealing directly with Amazon to build the most engaging product possible, and working with specialists in the building of voice user interfaces.

1 Month 2018
Senior Software Engineer, Gamesys, Games Services
January 2018
Gamesys Ltd.

Integrating two of the core services for the release and management of the latest in-game events feature, along with rebuilding and replacing the legacy application that serves and control the companies Facebook applications.

Contact

Phone

(+44) 7845 827 614

Location

Remote, or in & Around London, (preferably central)

Email

david (at) shipit.ltd