United Kingdom #

Berkshire, UK #

Alwyn Infant School 1988 #

Managed and taught other children in the class BBC Computers and the Turtle to draw creative images on paper.

High Wycombe Software Development Agency 1994 #

Work experience placement to work on the Apple Newton device to implement the first wired ethernet networking connection to work with TCP/IP.

Altwood C of E School #

1996 Constructed an internal network of computers for the library, such that students can access curriculum content on the internet.
1996 When PCs weren't being used across the school network, I used their downtime screensave to process Seti @ Home data chunks from Berkeley.
1997 Visual Basic windows desktop application allowing teachers to input students grades to mail merge them into printing the reports over using pen and paper across the whole school.

Nortel 1996 #

6 week summer work placement at Maidenhead. Networking infrastructure. global FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) connection with Canada and other offices. Upgrading routers with ARP tables via COM3 port interfaces. Built their first internal Intranet using HTML 1.0/CSS.

Burger King 1996 #

Achieved the fastest whooper burger making time whilst working at Burger King as a student.

Compaq Computers 1999-2000 #

Year In Industry program to work with Compaq Computers and have excursions at universities for weekend training.
Automated Europe wide metric collections for their support centers. Prepare for non-millenium bug New Years with multiple cellular and telecommunication fail over system. Implemented new Lucent telephoney from Nortel, digital VOIP.

Summer work - 2000-2003 #

To pay through university.
2001 Glaxosmithkline packing toothpaste tubes.
Sainsbury's night shifts.
Teleresearch company on behalf of the government for climate carbon offset research.

Southampton, UK #

Southampton University 2000-2003 #

Computer Science with Distributed Systems BSc
Final dissertation was constructing a mobile phone application to use Java MIDP to analyze a road sign symbol and look it up Computer Vision techniques and a SOAP web based service for lookup.
Following from my Judo in 1990 I studied Hung Leng Kuen Fung Fu. Trained under Sijo Dutton for 3 years on all forms.

London, UK #

Complinet - Thomson Reuters - 2003 - 2007 #

KYC Sanction search service - Java based search system with a desktop and web client to search named individuals that are on international financial sanctioned lists.
Media Search service - Indexing 300k news articles daily and extracting names via Named Entity Extraction (NLP) to allow finding names that are mentioned along those that are sanctioned for clients such as GE Money and Deutsche Bank.
Java Enterprise - Introducing Enterprise Java for global load balanced solutions and uptime. Worked on Javascript controls such as autocomplete and other early web 2.0 concepts for rich web experiences. Installing and setting up physical servers with openSUSE VM virtualization at peer1 in Vancouver, BC.

Obimesh Consulting 2007 - 2009 #

Twitterfeed - making RSS feeds update Twitter in real-time. Publishing 6m RSS feeds every 24 hours on a Ruby EventMachine driven stack over RabbitMQ.

The RSA - Advisory on all future use of digital technology in Britain.

Social Innovation / FutureGov / Enabled By Design
2008 SICamp. AccessCity, Allow individuals to use their mobile phone to report un-accessible entrances and exits, for the TFL for improvement for the disabled.
Barnet Council digital strategy, advising Consverative party on Greater London Authority on open data. TweetyHall to put together social media from elected MPs
socializing with lovely people, me hacking in the back with the yellow and grey jumper

Hophive - project to index all tweets and using NLP to extract out address context to connect stories for neighbourhoods. Working with Timeout / Guardian.

Guardian
Built a ruby library for their first open data platform
Open Data Platform Launch partner. Created a vertical search of music/film reviews with social media

JobsGoPublic - CTO - completing migration from Coldfusion to Rails with their development team. Introducing Agile software development practises and overhauling their DevOps.

London Ruby User Group (LRUG) - 2008 - 2011 #

Ruby Manor - Organized and run a UK conference on leading Ruby and Rails topics.
Organized and spoke to developers in London monthly for a regular meetup on Ruby. Topics I spoke about were realtime web, event machine loop optimizations and async threading.

GoFreeRange - 2009 - 2011 #

Co-founded leading London Ruby development agency.

Telefonica / O2 - Wrote a Ruby library for SMSCs to capture and forward SMS messages into an API, worked with TweetDesk

Mubi - Upgraded full web platform from Rails 2 to Rails 3. Optimized all aspects of the web platform for performance and fast development practises.

Chromorama - Created a fun game to allow individuals travelling on the TFL to plot their journeys with Oyster card taps and data APIs.

Alpha.gov - Designed and proposed software architecture approach to re-build all the UK government services with a unique novel approach using HTML/JS and Rails development to ensure all services continued to work and a whole new stack to be built. Developed correct business relationships and put together the right staff to lead the development at the UK cabinet office.

Canada #

Vancouver, BC. #

VanRuby 2012 - 2018 #

Formed and ran ruby meetup that led to having 80-100 developers meet monthly. That spoke about topics of web development in Ruby and other languages such as JavaScript.

Redhand 2011 #

Making tablets security camera products. Allowing for capturing video footage and detecting movement. Built out the Rails infrastructure for the mobile client applications.

Caliper - 2011 - 2012 #

First JavaScript error collection and performance monitoring service for early JavaScript front end applications written in BackboneJS.

Microsoft #

2012 Make Web Not War - presenting and discussing Realtime Web infrastructure for the future.
2017 The future of conversational AI systems to interact with people, how computers will use this as the new method of UI

Brewhouse 2012 - 2018 #

Founded leading Canada Ruby development Agency. To work with growing tech companies such as Loft47, Clio, CommandWear & Mobify.

Built and sold Goodbits.

Holopod - 2018 #

Built MacOS client With facial recognition ML to set a 'making coffee' status to update in Slack.
Allowed teams like Telus and Netflix to allow their remote staff to improve their working environment.

Vision Critical - 2019 #

Formed VC Labs to create 3 new revenue growing products.

Shopify - 2020 - 2022 #

Formed and led the FED community across 2000 developers. Leading React (completing migration of full Shopify stack to React, largest TypeScript codebase known to Microsoft) and Front End Design thinking. Design Systems.

Led performance initiatives leading to reduction of all requests to Shopify by 300ms.

Consolidated and unified all Shopify Mobile application development into correct business structure and strategy. Including migration to React Native engineering approach.

Overhauled all software developer role promotion and growth job matrices.

During pandemic, introduced correct practises for developers to work remotely ensuring they were happy and content working with one another with only Slack and Google Hangouts.

Talks #

November 2010 - LRUG - more websockets - Overview of Websockets and how to work with modern realtime HTTP
Feb 2018 - VanRuby - Deploying ActionCable - Implementing realtime web in Rails 5.0
Hack the Entreprenuer - Breaking out of your comfort Zone - podcast episode discussing forming businesses

Travels #

Backpacked around the world. My highlights.

• One of the oldest jungle in the world, Taman Negara. Highlight here was getting a leech on my foot when trekking through the jungle and once waking in the night for a toilet trip and seeing a swarm of black bugs for the outhouse. One night I'll never forget.
• Thailand. Spent a number of weeks exploring it all, not the beaches where people just partied to the full moon but I throughly enjoyed the oldest city in the country Ayutthaya where I saw magnificent temples and structures that makes you wonder how old they really were.
• Batu Caves in Malaysia. Formed 400 million years ago, and meaning 'rock'. they are a lovely shrine and temple today. I remember having to trek a number of steps up and up. And remembering that I needed water a number of times as I took them up.
• Another in Malaysia is the Cameron Highlands, the tea farms. Funnily enough I went to a Sikh temple there and had Langar from the priest there. They always have their doors open. was a wonder to see and witness.
• Ponte Vecchio - a magnificent bridge that has a load of history in how it was burnt and the rebuilt many times through the ages. One night, I walked the city of Florence and found myself sitting there with a couple of lovely ladies discussing the uniqueness of the architecture.
• Copenhagen - specifically cycling around the city and getting lost. Was wonderful to see the canals and colours of their boats.
• Amphitheatre of El Jem in Tunisia. An oval amphitheatre that makes you first think it's a Gladiator theatre but when you see the structure of rooms and roofing around it, I thought it was an old university or library.
• Japan. Lots to share here, but two I want to share. Himeji Castle, an unbelievable fortress that has lovely gardens that visitors can tour and find zen. There were trees that were supported with a unique method to ensuring their structure was beautiful, like a scaffold of sticks on them. Koyasan Mount Koya. Having to take a cable car up the mountain, I remember having to layer up my clothing as it was so cold up there. I was blessed to be allowed to sit with the buddhists with their morning rituals and traning. Learnt a lot about meditation and one's mind/body.
• San Juan Teotihuacán. One of the best structures I've seen in my life. It was on my bucket list to find the best Aztec structure to explore and study. The Sun temple there is unique and as you walk it, you know it was used for something very specific in history. I saw it as a place of healing for those that were there in how they used the stages of the sun and moon. Magnificent.
• Iceland. Was very lucky to tour the country with my family in 2022. One place sticks with me, Vik with it's black sands and a church that sits on top of the town.