I am an experienced Lead Software Developer from Portsmouth, UK with a demonstrated history of working in: Financial Services, Digital Marketing, Automotive and Recruitment sectors.
I have worked with software for over 22 years, 14 of which have been in industry.
I started as a Flash Developer supporting the marketing team in creating interactive banners to advertise various insurances & financial services products.
Very quickly my personal development background was noticed and I transitioned into a member of the development team with a strong focus on frontend & backend development.
My role was heavily influenced by marketing, this made me an extremely critical thinker in the role I played to company and to this day makes me think of development with a ROI mindset.
Development practices were great utilising: Jira, Jenkins & GIT. I was lucky enough to work with the founder of PHP Hampshire and many other senior developers of the same caliber. Working with such talented developers meant I was influenced to avoid bad habits and jump straight into good, tried & tested habits.
I joined Vertical Leap to fill a skills gap between an existing backend developer and lead designer. I eventually became responsible for all frontend, backend, responsive development as well as HTML email campaigns.
This was the first role where I had to have complete responsibility for everything I worked on with no senior developers as a safety net. This was an important process to make myself completely self dependant and fully responsible for everything I made.
Vertical Leap as a digital marketing agency meant that timekeeping & self management were extremely important. I learned to create development solutions to fit a huge ranges of timing constraints, I believe this is where the true skill of an engineer exists, in creating the required functionality within the given time.
I also gained a huge array of marketing skills: SEO, PPC, Social, Content. While I consider these secondary skills, they help craft the shape of my development solutions into something that works for a large range of applications.
Being in an agency situation also meant giving demos to external clients and maintaining good relationships with these people every day. I learned to be an effective communicator and gained an ability to easily explain complex development processes or constraints in plain English with good analogies enabling more people to get involved and understand the development process.
Working at JDI I was placed into a very large team of developers with sub teams, there was a high demand for frontend development which I would usually jump into. The nature of such large teams put a huge emphasis on agile & sprint based work and a transparent development process.
I was also exposed to a huge range of new technology that put me at the cutting edge of what was available. JDI was a changing point in my career where I became very aware of the importance of keeping up to date with everything new.
I started to broaden my skillset further into server technology and picked up lots of new software development techniques & practices.
I joined Kee to take the senior developer role, this involved making the development process more transparent, methodical and bringing the overall development process to the highest standard that I could.
Huge amounts of automation, safety nets and documentation were implemented to streamline the development process, prevent any pitfalls in the existing process and open up development to the entire company.
I joined the STR Group to initially take full responsibility of the websites, moving from the legacy format to a release based system to power any number of job board websites with extremely low maintenance requirements and high customisation.
I now lead on all subsequent software projects covering a wide range of technologies.