Professional Summary
Over 18 years experience in a variety of industries, developing distributed systems and web applications. I am passionate about improving the way that software is developed, with a particular focus on simplicity and quality. I have plenty of experience of delivering high-quality applications which have been developed in a sustainable manner.
I like to work on simple systems, refactoring ruthlessly to evolve the design. I’m a big believer in starting small, demoing & releasing often, and iterating based on user feedback.
In 2008 I began learning Scala, in 2009 I used it on a small production application, and at Sky I introduced it to the team, switching all new development to Scala. In recent years I have enjoyed learning pure functional programming in Haskell. Through this journey I have found that fully utilising the type system results in clearly documented code, that is simple to test and easy to reason about. At Deutsche Bank I championed Haskell and Elm for two production applications, which was well received within the team.
Key Skills
- Functional Programming
- Continuous Delivery
- XP/Agile
- Pair Programming
- Scala
- ScalaJS
- React
- Haskell
- Elm
- CSS3
- SQL
Open Source
Elm Websocket—a library for creating a websockets server in Haskell, which automatically generates the Elm client code. This includes JSON codecs and data types, derived from the Haskell types.
Clairvoyance—a specification-by-example testing framework that produces living documentation on the system's behaviour.
Experience
I am part of a four-person team developing a new structured notes sales platform. Rather than develop the platform in isolation, we began by finding existing sales and trading users, tried to understand the challenges they faced, and built systems to improve their efficiency. To date, we have replaced the existing error prone Excel pricing spreadsheet with a web UI, and automated the generation of term-sheets. The resulting increase in sales year-over-year has been attributed to the automation.
We are a small, co-located team, with a large degree of autonomy over technical and project management decisions. Our technology stack is functional Scala using Typelevel libraries, with Typescript and ReactJS to build the UI. To minimise risk and improve our ability to react to changes, we completely automated our continuous delivery pipeline, enabling production releases twice a week.
Developed a front-office application for the lifecycle management of trades within Structured Finance. The project consisted of a small team of developers, responsible for talking to senior members of the business, building the system to capture the transactions, and supporting it in production. The project has been a large success, and we had a good relationship with front and middle office.
On this application I championed a number of technologies within the team. The front-end was a single page app written in ScalaJS (on top of React). This allowed us to shared data types, safely refactor across the entire stack, and write some pretty amazing abstractions to scrap boilerplate code. The server was written in functional scala using Typelevel libraries.
Part of a small team to rewrite an application to communicate with telephone switches. I was the main driver behind the team adopting Scala. I wrote a port our chosen acceptance testing framework to run with Specs2 tests, which I maintain on Github and has a number of users outside of Sky.
I also lead the development of rewriting an address matching application, using Lucene, Scala, Scalaz, Dispatch and Spray, which was delivered ahead of all estimates, despite most of the team having to come up to speed on Scala. The application is written in a pure functional style and has no exceptions, no 'if' statements and had only one small bug once going live. It has a full set of automated tests and can be deployed to production in minutes.
Education
University of Queensland, Master of Information Technology Studies, 2004-2005
ACU, Bachelor of Information Technology, 1997-1999
Sun Certified Java Developer, 2000