Curriculum vitae

Overview

Not so much a CV as a dumping ground while I try to remember what I did all those years. Very much a work in progress.

Education

MSc by Dissertation, Computer Science, University of Essex, 2021

Postgraduate research degree in Machine Learning, specifically k-means data clustering. Supervised by Dr. Renato Cordeiro de Amorim.

MSc Information Processing, University of York, 2000

Masters degree, Department of Computer Science.

  • Course modules included: Java Programming, Object-Oriented Software Engineering, Relational Database Design, Assembly Programming, Mathematics
  • Dissertation: "Unsupervised Segmentation of Tokenised Text" - a Natural Language Processing/Machine Learning project to discover natural language morphology, using Perl. Supervised by Dr. Dimitar Kazakov

MA (Hons) Linguistics & English Language, University of Edinburgh, 1999

Four year joint honours integrated Masters degree, with a particular focus on historical and computational linguistics.

  • Honours dissertation on syntactic change in the history of the English Language: a Natural Language Processing project using Perl to analyse the Penn-Helsinki Corpus. Supervised by Prof. Caroline Heycock
  • Additional courses included a year in Artificial Intelligence involving programming in Prolog

Contract Work

Developer, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 2014-2017

  • Sony/ATV and EMI Production Music brands
  • Backend development
  • PHP5, Symfony framework, Doctrine, Solr

Consultant, Bloomberg, 2012-2014

  • BNEF
  • Key skills: PHP5, C++
  • Additional skills: Oracle, jQuery, AngularJS

Developer, Comic Relief, 2011

  • PHP5, Zend Framework

Employment

Technical Architect, Encore Tickets, 2010-2011

  • legacy COBOL system
  • Key skills: REST, XML, SQL, architecture

Lead Developer/Technical Architect, Playphone, 2007-2010

Lead developer and technical architect on a team of up to seven developers in an agile/Scrum environment, with overall responsibility for the technical direction of all mobile Web and PHP-based systems.

  • Complete rearchitecture of the global consumer-facing mobile Web platform, replacing a procedural legacy system with a flexible, object-oriented component-based system
  • Improvement of development processes and practices, such as introduction of unit testing and TDD, and streamlining use of version control and deployment automation
  • Ongoing migration from a jumble of ad hoc "pure PHP" applications to a Service-Oriented Architecture (OTA, Number Validation, ...) based on Zend Framework MVC and proper object-oriented design
  • Build and maintenance of the production server cluster based on Linux, Apache, MongoDB and Zend Platform
  • Key skills: PHP5, MySQL, SOAP, team leadership, client facing, architecture, mobile content delivery
  • Additional skills: Java, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Linux/Apache admin

Lead Developer, PropertyMall, 2004-2007

Technical lead on a small but highly-skilled team of developers, growing the team from two to five people, architecting and developing several large applications, and introducing professional software development practices such as version control and unit testing.

  • Pim97, PLDB, propertymall.com/constructionmall.com
  • Key skills: PHP5, MySQL, architecture, XML and XML Schema, SOAP and WSDL, team leadership, client facing
  • Additional skills: UDP network programming

Senior Developer, I-D Media Ltd., 2001-2004

  • Back- and front-end development on projects for clients including PricewaterhouseCoopers, Renault, T-Mobile and FT.com
  • General Linux and Apache web server administration
  • Client facing, pitch preparation and project specification
  • Key technical skills: PHP4, MySQL/SQL, front-end web development, Perl, Linux
  • Additional skills: ASP classic/VBScript, Flash/ActionScript

Developer, Totally plc, 2000-2001

  • Key skills: Perl, PHP3/4, MySQL, HTML
  • Additional skills: Photoshop, IT support