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.

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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.

• Thesis: "K-means Initialisation Algorithms: An Extensive Comparative Study"
• Co-authored research paper "An Extensive Empirical Comparison of K-means Initialization Algorithms" published in IEEE Access, IEEE, vol. 10, pp. 58752-58768, 2022
• Three open-source libraries (pykmeans, pygendata, pycleandata) developed in Python to enable the research, using scikit-learn, Pandas and NumPy extensively. All libraries are released under the permissive MIT license

MSc Information Processing, University of York, 2000

Master's 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 master's 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

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Contract Work

Developer, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 2014-2017

• Backend development under the Sony/ATV and EMI Production Music brands
• Primary responsibilities includied development and maintenance of the REST API to support the AngularJS front end, and the core music search functionality
• Key skills: PHP7, Symfony MVC framework, Doctrine, Apache Solr

Consultant, Bloomberg, 2012-2014

• Backend development in the BNEF business unit
• Key skills: PHP5, MySQL, C++
• Additional skills: Oracle, jQuery, AngularJS

Developer, Comic Relief, 2011

• Development on the enterprise-scale FROST fundraising platform, focused on the mobile interface to the Sport Relief Mile entry and donations system, and the internal administration system
• Key skills: PHP5, Zend Framework, PHPUnit and jQuery

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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