Career

Amazon April '10 - present

Generally causing trouble!

Contrast April '09 - April '10

Head of Software Development. Developing and supporting web applications, using ruby on rails, google app engine and Amazon Web Services, on client projects and Exceptional.

IGOpeople May '08 - April '09

Lead Developer at a start-up. IGOpeople is a social network connecting businesses and consumers in an open and public environment. Implemented in ruby on rails.

• Consistently delivered working software (complete with automated tests) under tight deadlines. 8 weeks from starting the job to our first major release.
• I coordinated product planning sessions, combining ideas from our founder, our customers and other team members.
• I worked closely with our design firm, providing wire-frames and reviewing designs. I implemented all the designs from psd to html/css/js.
• I built relationships with the Dublin web community, to solicit feedback, and evangelize the product, both online (twitter, igopeople) and at networking and industry events.
• I configured and supported our application hosting and automated deployment. We deployed to slicehost, running ubuntu, nginx, postgres, sphinx, memcache, postfix, monit, munin, and mongrel.
• I denormalised our schema to optimize users news feeds for read performance.

Newbay May '07 - May '08

Principal Engineer. Team lead for MyFaves and Iconmaker projects with T-Mobile USA. Multi-million user, geo-redundant applications with many integration points: sms, mms, wap, web, WS*, billing, 3rd party. Deployed with solaris, f5, Oracle, swiftmq, nagios, apache, tomcat and jetty.

• I led our 10 person team through 3 major releases and many subprojects. I worked on everything from deployment configuration/automation, db schema/sql optimization, scope negotiations with customer, writing spec documents, wire level debugging of SMPP protocol, server side java to front end css/html and javascript coding.
• I quickly brought new team members up to speed with the system/project (testers, project managers, sales, pre-sales, developers, UI developers).
• I planned the simultaneous development of new product features, as well as production system support, bug fixes and change requests.
• I coordinated dozens of complex upgrades (and rollbacks) to the live system, often planned with no loss of service.


• I built trust with our customer through a no-nonsense, open, and honest relationship.
• Continuous process improvement: not just within our team, but in our relationship with the customer and 3rd parties. For example; getting buy in for more frequent releases; working collaboratively on new specifications; earlier integration and more cooperation with 3rd parties.
• Solving complex problems on tight deadlines. For example; T-mobile had a telephone area-code split that we needed to support. I implemented the required migration: from problem definition to live roll-out in 3 days.
• Invested time in developing tools, with quick pay-offs. For example; a tool to help our customer perform acceptance tests, shortening the time it took them to approve a release; A logging tool to capture trace logging for only a particular user(s), on the live system, across all apps/nodes, without restarts - providing useful and previously unavailable diagnostic information, when troubleshooting a problem.


• Simplified and automated the deployment procedure: Reduced a 60 page manual to 4 pages, resulting in much less human error. Doing this influenced other teams within Newbay to review their deployment procedures.
• I automated documentation generation of all SQL queries ran by our application, to speed up the DBA's acceptance process for new releases.
• I introduced DB schema versioning, and source control for migration scripts, ensuring repeatable releases, and consistent environments (dev/test/qa/production).
• I replaced handwritten process management scripts with more robust ones using Java Service Wrapper. Reliable stop/start. Consistent across linux and solaris environments.


• Constant refactoring during development: I reduced the code base size by >50% (was >100K LOC), and configuration files by >80%. I sped up build/test time from >10 minutes to <1 minute.
• Scaled app to double the users on the same hardware. Identified and fixed a bottleneck through bad implementation of SMPP protocol in gateway.

Also while at Newbay:

• I mentored the team lead and project manager of another project, helping them apply an agile approach to planning and development.
• I presented 'lunch and learn' sessions to the engineering and professional service departments. I encouraged other people to do the same.
• I built a quick working prototype of an SMS to IM app as part of a sales pitch.

Skiing, Chamonix: January '07 - May '07

Ticketsolve October '06 - December '06. (contract)

Developed (along with Eoin) the initial version of the ticketsolve product. Software as a service model applied to ticketing.

• We setup and managed colocated hosting running gentoo, pound, apache, mysql and postfix.
• Implemented using Ruby on Rails, and heavy use of unobtrusive javascript.

Exoftware August '05 - November '06

• Technical Mentoring/Consulting. 'Agile' technical practices - Test-Driven Development, Test Automation, Build Automation, Continuous Integration with Java/J2EE and .NET teams
• Design, Development and Deployment of box-office and online ticketing system for the Dublin International Film Festival 2006 and the Dublin Fringe Festival 2006.
• .NET, java and Ruby on Rails development
• Exactor/Exactor.net Contributor
• Certified Scrum Master

S1 December '04 - July '05

• SCM Engineer
• Responsible for build delivery, automation and maintenance for a large suite of Java J2EE applications. (IBM Shop: Websphere, DB2, Clearcase etc)
• Worked my self out of the job: turned brittle and largely manual process into fully automated release process that the product manager could run with a single command.
• Took lead role in group from all S1 sites (globally) to simplify and improve build/test and release automation.
• Optimized build and test scripts, saving developers precious time each day, and encouraging more frequent integration.
• Influenced the software developers to improve their code hygiene, leading by example - by refactoring code and tests and then explaining the patterns I'd applied.
• Actively promoted proper testing practices around company - both 'do and then tell' refactoring of existing poor tests - and through active contribution to company Wiki.

Scoilbuy September '04 - January '05

• Purchasing solution for Irish schools.
• Complete development of online store from requirements gathering to design, implementation, hosting and support.
• Lightweight Java frameworks: Jetty, Spring, Hibernate, Velocity, Javamail, POI(Excel Integration), IText (Pdf Integration), Lucene (Search), MySQL.

IBM June '03 - September '03

• "Extreme Blue" project intern. Integration of telephony systems (Spectel) with Sametime (IBM Instant Messenger System). See ENN Article [CACHED]
• Automated generation of deployable software including Java and native code for multiple platforms using Java Web Start. Some ant customisation for Web Start.
• Project has resulted in 1 International Patent so far.

NCL August '02 - September '02

• Technical Support, Maintenance, Research and Development.
• Refactored manual tests and build processes for ~100k LOC System. Produced a fully automated build and test system based on Ant, JUnit, CVS and AntHill.
• Website generation - XML, XSL, ANT.
• Documentation management - Velocity, FOP(Pdf generation), ANT.

Allied Irish Banks June '99 - July '99

• Hardware and Software Technical Support, mission critical environment (100+ people).
• Custom work with Microsoft Access.