Quinn Daley, Developer in Leeds, United Kingdom
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Quinn Daley

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Full-stack Developer

Location
Leeds, United Kingdom
Toptal Member Since
April 13, 2020

Quinn is a full-stack developer with 17 years of experience in a variety of stacks, frameworks, and DevOps setups. He has been freelancing since 2015—having built technology from the ground up for a number of startups including the seed tech for Noiiz and Improve Your Accent. Prior to this, Quinn ran the Leeds Dev Centre for multinational Trend Micro in a management and architecture role. Quinn is most at home with Ruby on Rails and Vue.js, and has a soft spot for Crystal, Go, and Perl.

Portfolio

Freelance
Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Codeship, Heroku, Docker, PostgreSQL, Vue...
William Hill
VMware, Puppet, Docker, Ruby
Trend Micro
Jenkins, Memcached, Puppet, RabbitMQ, MySQL, Go, Perl

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Trello, Basecamp, Slack, Codeship, Git, Heroku, Docker Compose, Firefox, Chrome, Atom, Linux, GNU

The most amazing...

...thing in my portfolio is the Improve Your Accent online course. I developed all the technology, and taught tech skills to the business owner in the process.

Work Experience

Full-stack Developer

2015 - PRESENT
Freelance
  • Developed the initial technology for over a dozen startups and spinoffs, including Noiiz, Improve Your Accent, Commscanner, Care View, Gigappy, and Digital Urban.
  • Created clean and maintainable code according to the principle of convention-over-configuration, leaving clients able to continue to develop in-house or learn skills themselves over time.
  • Organized many training sessions to increase the technical skill level at clients, especially with the business owner and CTO.
  • Developed public sector technology that went on to win many awards including a six-figure grant from the European Space Agency for further development.
  • Created a blog post on the subject of building a progressive web app in Rails API and Nuxt.js that has become the most-read post on the subject and ranks high (or top) in Google searches for the topic.
Technologies: Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Codeship, Heroku, Docker, PostgreSQL, Vue, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Contract Ruby Developer

2015 - 2016
William Hill
  • Worked as one of three developers for a large devops team building out a complete internal PaaS-style cloud based on Docker.
  • Used Ruby in its "other" popular use case, as a system operations language, both building database-backed infrastructure management software and directly as part of the Puppet DevOps system.
  • Contributed a huge amount of code to the VMware vCloud libraries within the open-source Fog.io project, resulting in me being named the most valuable player for Fog.io 1.37.
Technologies: VMware, Puppet, Docker, Ruby

Site Manager and Architect

2010 - 2015
Trend Micro
  • Held various manager and architecture jobs during this time, culminating in being placed in charge of the entire Leeds Development Centre.
  • Ran a customer support engineering project for a popular consumer product.
  • Served in a management and architecture position for a major cloud application with over 1 petabyte of data.
  • Managed a team responsible for delivering a global realtime messaging system based on Go and RabbitMQ.
  • Worked closely with the main development team in Taiwan, including many trips between the UK and Taiwan.
Technologies: Jenkins, Memcached, Puppet, RabbitMQ, MySQL, Go, Perl

Lead Software Engineer

2003 - 2010
Transitive | IBM
  • Developed a suite of DevOps software for an "untestable" product before DevOps was cool. The tech we built was similar to Jenkins, Puppet, and GitHub pull requests before any of those technologies existed.
  • Worked at a very low level with a huge heterogenous farm of machines with different CPU architectures, running multiple flavors of Unix and Linux, getting to grips with the subtle differences between them.
  • Worked as part of a team that developed software that ultimately shipped on every Intel Mac from their release in 2006 and every IBM System p server.
Technologies: MacOS, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, MySQL, Perl

Improve Your Accent Online Course

The Improve Your Accent online course is the digital syllabus from 2017 Freelancer of the Year winner Luke Nicholson.
I built all the technology for the course, including a sophisticated backend that allows Luke to add and edit content. Because this is a specialized subject, the course could not be built with off-the-shelf e‑learning technology, and it features:
• A progressive web app experience, where the frontend is loaded into the user's device and feels "native"
• Integration with Braintree for payments and subscriptions
• IPA transcriptions that can be turned on or off
• Integrated audio players with speed controls
• Integrated video players
• Various different types of guessing games
• Click-for-audio vowel and consonant charts
• Integration with Demio for live classes
• User bookmarks and progress recording
The course launched in March 2020 and has already been a great success with several paying customers.

Noiiz

https://www.noiiz.com/
Noiiz is a Leeds startup that is revolutionizing the world of music production by providing access to a vast catalogue of sounds and presets for a single subscription price. It's been featured in Music Tech Magazine, Sound On Sound, and more and has thousands of regular users.
I've been working with Noiiz since the very beginning, bootstrapping their technology with the Rails web app that powers their main catalog. Now they have their own development team and a network of freelancers and I've been working closely with them to develop features and enhancements, and consulting on the best ways to scale the platform/training their CTO on tech skills.
Some of the technical features I've introduced to Noiiz include:
• A search and filtering engine for the catalog featuring PostgreSQL tsvector technology
• Deep integration with Stripe for recurring payments
• Quota management for users on different subscription plans
• An in-browser audio player with the waveform display
• Administration interface with spreadsheet upload functionality for adding new sounds to the catalog
• A jobs worker that handles the background processing of sound metadata

Care View

https://www.care.vu/
Care View is a project developed by the Urban Sustainable Development Lab, where I worked as a full-stack developer.

This Rails-based app allows citizens to report instances of neglect in the built environment, which are aggregated together into a heatmap. The intention is to help frontline services identify socially isolated citizens, testing a hypothesis that these two things are connected.

Care View is a progressive web app with a light touch interface—once a user is logged in, they can use geolocation to record their concern with a single tap. The project was launched as a pilot in three cities and has received multiple awards, including funding from the NHS of England and a six-figure grant from the European Space Agency.

Commscanner

Commscanner is online software that helps you deliver, track and analyse all your online and offline communications effectively. It provides a single integrated dashboard for tracking which of your communication channels are having the biggest impact by providing customized URLs and QR codes for each channel.
I built all the technology for Commscanner, working closely with the concept's inventor.

Languages

Ruby, Perl, Markdown, CSS, HTML, Sass, JavaScript, ES7, Crystal, Go, Python

Frameworks

Ruby on Rails (RoR), Nuxt.js, Bulma, Vuetify, Swagger, Chrome, JSON Web Tokens (JWT)

Libraries/APIs

Ruby on Rails API, Vue, REST APIs, Vuex, Stripe, OpenAPI, Google Maps API

Paradigms

Requirements Analysis, Web Architecture, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), REST

Platforms

Heroku, Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, Firefox, Solaris, HP-UX, MacOS

Other

Full-stack, Technical Leadership, Architecture, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Progressive Web Applications (PWA), GNU, OAuth, BrainTree, Chargebee, Identity & Access Management (IAM), HTML5 Geolocation

Tools

Git, Codeship, GitHub, AWS IAM, Cucumber, RSpec, Atom, Docker Compose, Slack, Basecamp, Trello, RabbitMQ, Jenkins, VMware, Jekyll, Puppet, Chef, Webpack

Storage

PostgreSQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Memcached, MySQL, PostGIS

Industry Expertise

Project Management

2000 - 2003

Bachelor of Science Degree (Honors, First Class) in Computer Science

Victoria University of Manchester - Manchester, UK

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