Kev Jackson, Developer in Warrington, United Kingdom
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Kev Jackson

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Warrington, United Kingdom

Toptal member since November 26, 2021

Expertise
LinuxJavaSoftware DevelopmentPythonSQLSpring BootGitHubTerraformGitAWSAWS LambdaKubernetesDockerCloud Engineering
Bio

Kev has worked in various business domains and sectors, including energy, billing, education, eCommerce, logistics, and warehousing. He's currently working on a government-funded research project. He's looking for additional work as he's used to combining his main job with different projects. He's enthusiastic about meeting his new clients and working on exciting projects.

Portfolio

The Hut.com
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Java, Spring Boot, Consul, Scala, Terraform...
RMIT International University
Java, Software Engineering, GAE, C
Cogini
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Erlang (OTP), PHP, Linux

Experience

  • Linux - 7 years
  • Java - 7 years
  • Python - 5 years
  • SQL - 5 years
  • Terraform - 3 years
  • OpenStack - 2 years
  • C - 1 year

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Linux, Java, Python, SQL, Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), OpenStack

The most amazing...

...contributions I've made to a global eCommerce system are websites, content management, full-text search, deployment pipelines, scaling, and RDBMS design.

Work Experience

Principal Software Engineer

2014 - PRESENT
The Hut.com
  • Led the refactoring of an eCommerce platform to improve reliability and improve the user journey. Focused on using APM tools to drill down into code paths and fix the encountered issues.
  • Used AWS Lambda and SQS to build a bridge between monitoring tools and chat tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
  • Migrated a warehouse management system from AWS to OpenStack using CloudFormation, Terraform, and Google Cloud Deployment Manager.
  • Developed Terraform infrastructure-as-code scripts to allow deploying Kubernetes clusters onto OpenStack nodes.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Java, Spring Boot, Consul, Scala, Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, OpenStack, Clojure, AWS Lambda, Jenkins Job DSL, Jenkins Pipeline, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Route 53

Senior Lecturer

2010 - 2014
RMIT International University
  • Re-developed a C programming course, converting it from MS Windows and Visual Studio to Linux, GCC, and Vim. I also re-developed a software engineering course, converting it from J2EE to Spring Framework and IoC.
  • Wrote and administered exams for Java programming, software engineering, design patterns, and web development.
  • Led a team of lecturers to develop and deliver software engineering content to Vietnamese undergraduates.
Technologies: Java, Software Engineering, GAE, C

Contract Developer

2008 - 2008
Cogini
  • Helped develop a variety of projects, including a bus timetable and routing app.
  • Worked remotely with lead engineers in Taiwan, fixing bugs and developing the admin web application.
  • Handled day-to-day development, bug fixes, and suggestions for additional features.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails (RoR), Erlang (OTP), PHP, Linux

Experience

Script to Deploy Kubernetes Clusters

https://github.com/OpenSource-THG/k8s-on-openstack
We needed to develop a new tool to help dev teams rapidly create their Kubernetes clusters deployed onto OpenStack. We used Pulumi as the infrastructure-as-code tool. However, the whole thing could be converted easily to Terraform.

In the past, single shared clusters were provisioned, which was deemed to not meet the requirements of dev teams that were becoming geographically dispersed and needed access to their clusters. This meant we needed the proper tooling to build clusters rapidly.

Deploying Teleport to OpenStack via Pulumi

https://github.com/OpenSource-THG/teleport-gcp-example
To reduce the number of identity providers and VPN connections needed, I researched using Teleport to provide secure and audited access to resources in OpenStack (VMs and Kubernetes cluster).

I planned, designed, and implemented the solution from inception to deploying on production infrastructure as a security research project.

The full write-up is not yet published.

Warehouse Management System

https://medium.com/thg-tech-blog/dynamically-building-build-servers-a6e785655834
At THG, I was a key contributor to the development of an event-driven warehouse management system (WMS). The WMS was developed primarily in Java with Spring, along with some microservices written in Scala and Kotlin.

I was heavily involved in the infrastructure management, including AWS EC2 instances along with Route53 for DNS, S3 for docs, DynamoDB and RDS for state, and Lambda.

I worked in CloudFormation and Ansible for deployments, Jenkins for CI pipelines, and core Java, Scala, and Kotlin for application features.

As a senior engineer, I was very involved with mentoring the junior staff about AWS practices and was a key member of the team that migrated the stack from AWS to OpenStack.

Some blog posts about the project:
• https://medium.com/thg-tech-blog/dynamically-building-build-servers-a6e785655834
• https://medium.com/thg-tech-blog/capturing-application-metrics-1ef6c5dcbce5
• https://medium.com/thg-tech-blog/a-feather-in-their-caps-4c4083cf9f46
• https://medium.com/thg-tech-blog/continuous-process-improvements-ac6fad24290c
• https://medium.com/thg-tech-blog/terraformin-6bf6c592d8a2
• https://medium.com/thg-tech-blog/consolidating-database-technologies-d424f1a4c47e

Education

2008 - 2010

Master of Science Degree in Management and Implementation of Development Projects

The University of Manchester - Manchester, UK

1996 - 1999

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

The University of Manchester - Manchester, UK

Skills

Libraries/APIs

Cloud-Init, Jenkins Job DSL, Jenkins Pipeline

Tools

Terraform, GitHub, AWS CloudFormation, Git, GitLab, Jenkins, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Languages

Java, Python, SQL, C, Scala, Clojure, Erlang (OTP), PHP, TypeScript

Platforms

Linux, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), OpenStack, AWS Lambda, Kubernetes, Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon EC2

Frameworks

Spring Boot, Ruby on Rails (RoR), GAE

Paradigms

Functional Programming

Storage

Amazon S3 (AWS S3)

Other

Software Development, Consul, Software Engineering, Risk Management, CI/CD Pipelines, Amazon RDS, Amazon Route 53

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