CTO & Senior Consultant
2020 - PRESENTIntelligent Hack- Helped reduce technical debt in the 20-year-old codebase of a client by, among others, cleaning up millions of lines of unused and redundant code.
- Brought in a culture of engineering excellence and helped client employees to feel empowered and gain a sense of ownership of their codebase.
- Restructured a large Visual Studio solution to enable large-scale refactoring, like reducing the number of projects used by over 170.
Technologies: .NET Core, C#, .NET, Microsoft SQL Server, Redis, Leadership, Code Architecture, Simplicity, Database Performance, SQL Performance, Website Performance, Observability, Monitoring, Azure, Azure DevOps, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, LINQ, Team Effectiveness, Team Leadership, Windows PowerShell, Performance EngineeringSenior Software Engineer
2018 - 2019FunFair- Wrote a code generator that produced JavaScript, TypeScript, and Solidity code based on a JSON description file. This was needed to ensure the product front end and the Ethereum blockchain were packing and unpacking transferred data in the same way.
- Migrated many database fields to use less storage, as initially, they were using varchar fields to hold what was essentially binary data. This translated to very large space savings and more database transactions per second.
- Implemented consumption of WebSocket subscriptions to replace direct polling of Ethereum nodes.
Technologies: C#, .NET Core, Microsoft SQL Server, Ethereum, Blockchain, TypeScript, JavaScript, Solidity, Code Architecture, Simplicity, ASP.NET MVC, AWS, Visual Studio, Windows PowerShellSenior Software Engineer
2013 - 2018Stack Overflow- Revamped the user profile, including inline reputation graphs and the introduction of user metric such as the social impact of a user on the community.
- Wrote the export scripts still used for the quarterly data dumps that Stack Overflow produces (questions and answers, comments, and other public data). This is a highly efficient process that dumps many terabytes of data into files in hours.
- Implemented a header redesign that was launched on over 300 sites and brought much-needed cohesion to the Stack Exchange network of sites.
Technologies: C#, .NET, Microsoft SQL Server, Website Performance, Database Performance, Performance Engineering, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Redis, HAProxy, Simplicity, Visual Studio, Windows PowerShell, SQL PerformanceFounder and Consultant
2005 - 2013JADOC- Wrote an automated image resizing application based on highly specific parameters and workflow, estimated to save £90,000 per year. Client: ASOS.
- Designed and wrote a dynamic website generator and deployer. This included website creation and deployment, database creation, public DNS updates, and hooking up the systems. This work saved many person-hours every month. Client: Liquid Thinking.
- Helped Tesco revamp and modernize their groceries website. At the time, they had the largest retail site in the world.
Technologies: C#, .NET, Microsoft SQL Server, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Code Architecture, LeadershipSenior Software Engineer
2001 - 2004Figleaves- Designed and wrote a custom content management system for the commerce site, allowing the marketing department to create custom web pages without developer intervention.
- Wrote a sophisticated customer segmentation tool, allowing the marketing department to target highly specific segments of the user base.
- Implemented an issues and bug tracking system for internal IT usage.
Technologies: ASP.NET, Microsoft SQL Server, HTML, JavaScript, CSS