CURRICULUM VITAE

Programming languages:

Operating systems:

Internet/WWW:

• Apache/mod_ssl/mod_perl admin/config
• Standards compliant CGI/PHP/HTML/XHTML/XML/CSS development
• log analysis
• Static/dynamic content delivery design and implementation
• Template driven content management
• Web site support/help desk management/implementation
• Search Engine Optimisation, Sitemaps, Analytics

Databases:

Hardware:

Document Management:

Configuration Management:

Fault reporting:

Perl modules:

Communications:

• TCP/IP, NIS, NFS, CCITT No7 Signalling, SMS
• HTML, HTTP, XMLRPC, SOAP, CGI, SMTP, NNTP

Software Engineering:

• Customer requirements analysis and review
• Object oriented analysis and design
• Data analysis and design
• Configuration management system design, implementation and use
• Test design and development of testing procedures
• Software release and delivery
• Change control reviews, formal reviews

Standards:

• ISO9001 Quality Standard (AS3961-1987/NZS9001:1990/ISO9001:1987), Quality Systems for Design/Development, Production, Installation and Servicing
• AS3563 (AS3563.1-1991), Software Quality Management Systems - Requirements

YourAmigo: June 2005 - present

Role: Senior Software Engineer

The company is a world leader in SEO (search engine optimisation) and provides hosted SEO solutions for large scale internet retailers, mostly in the US and Europe. Provided assistance as the company grew substantially over the last 4 years.

Achievements:

• Contributed to the company's hosted SEO platform built on a LAMP stack (Centos, Apache 2.2, MySQL, Perl/Catalyst)
• Systems programming and system administration for the company's network of servers in Europe/North America. Developed software to intelligently shed load during periods of high traffic.
• Built the company's support infrastructure including the development of software/procedures for support, on-call support and pre-sales. Using RT, replaced the support email alias with a ticket tracking system and trained all staff in its use. Lead pre-sales engineer.
• Acted as a mentor for junior programmers and presented several lectures on programming techniques.
• Designed and implemented various libraries, test harnesses, log analysers, reporting scripts and installation scripts (in Perl and various shells). Documented these programs and trained developers and administrators in their use.

Bodza FOSS/Internet Development Group: September 2004 - ongoing

Role: Director/Lead Developer

Founded this company to foster East African software development, particularly in the area of Free/Open Source Software Development. Working with local government officials to train African software developers to participate in open source projects.

Various Kenyan community groups: January 2004 - January 2005

Role: Development Consultant

Worked with various local groups to author proposals seeking funding from various donors (UN Development Programme, Kenyan National AIDS Control Council, UNAIDS) for community based schemes, including a crab farm and a community banking scheme.

Achievements:

• Secured 300,000 Kenyan Shillings in funding from the UN Development Program to establish a crab farm in the Lamu Archipelago.
• Secured KSh330,000 in funding from the Kenyan National AIDS Control Council to subsidise village health care costs and to establish a community small scale loan facility.

NTL: May 2002 - December 2003

Role: Senior UNIX software developer in the wholesale internet division

The company is one of the UK's largest Internet Service Providers, providing broadband (cable modem and DSL) and narrowband (dial-up) service to millions of customers throughout Britain and Northern Ireland. These services with branding are sold wholesale to various companies in the UK.

Achievements:

• Designed, developed and deployed registration web applications using Apache/mod_perl and Javascript. The applications included credit card validation, fraud and crime detection. Additionally, during registration, client software was dynamically created to configure the subscriber's computer (Any flavour of Windows, Mac OS 8-9 and OS X, Linux).
• Provided 4th level support for various UNIX-based systems throughout the company.
• Liaised with virtual ISP clients about their registration requirements and quality of service. Prepared and presented demonstrations of proposed system improvements.
• After consultations to gather requirements, overhauled an outdated reporting system (Perl/Oracle) to provide internal business units and customers with timely information about subscriber usage patterns.

Travel Central/East Africa & Australia: August 2001 - April 2002

Hybyte Solutions & Services: December 2000 - July 2001

Role: Senior SMS application developer

The company deployed interactive SMS applications on the German mobile network. The application environment consisted of a Perl/CGI based web site and a proprietary SMS protocol interface also in Perl. The operating environment was a homogeneous network of Linux machines.

Achievements:

• Maintained and enhanced the application services framework as a set of Perl objects communicating via shared memory.
• Developed Perl objects implementing various services on top of the above framework.
• Installed and customised a fault tracking system (DCL). Administered the system and trained local users. Fed changes back to the principle DCL developer.
• Trained Junior developers in using Perl objects and other aspects of the language.

e-smith Inc.: August 2000 - November 2000

Role: Open source software engineer/advisor

E-smith was a small but growing Linux vendor. This work was mostly carried out remotely via ssh from sites in Australia and the UK to the e-smith office in Ottawa, Canada.

Achievements:

• Evaluated, installed and customised a fault tracking system. The fault tracking system chosen was DCL.
• Provided support/training in the use of the Emacs editor.

Salomon Smith Barney Australia: March 2000 - August 2000

Role: Application Engineering specialist

Responsible for developing software release and support procedures for the SSB Australia web site. The web site consisted of a mixture of static and dynamic content and utilised many different proprietary and open source web technologies.

Achievements:

• Unified a disparate set of user management systems into a single easy-to-use intranet web page (Perl/CGI/Sybase) eliminating the need for various groups within the company to keep duplicate customer records.
• Developed a set of guidelines and procedures to be used by support staff to deal with both internal and external support issues. This ensured there was a consistent "face" presented to customers irrespective of the level or experience of the support staff dealing with an issue. Trained 1st and 2nd level support staff in using the guidelines.
• Evaluated and installed a collaborative web technology on the local intranet so that these procedures could be dynamically updated or annotated by support staff.
• Performed a detailed analysis of the site in preparation for an overhaul of the key components. Using Perl, produced a detailed map from web site CGI scripts to the various back-end systems that they relied on for data.
• Liaised with business analysts with respect to support issues and produced reports showing utilisation of support resources by each customer business unit.

Aurema Pty. Ltd.: May 1999 - August 2000

Role: Toolsmith/Quality Consultant

Provided technical support and training as the company made the transition to standards based software development.

Achievements:

• Provided expertise with respect to standards based software development, with particular reference to the application of ISO 9001 and AS 3563 to configuration management, software release and maintenance.
• Evaluated fault tracking software and designed a local customisation of the GNATS fault tracking software with local extensions to allow fault dependency tracking, easy addition/deletion of states and security restrictions on individual state/field changes.
• Supervised the development/installation of these extensions and liaised with the open source community about integrating these changes into the canonical source.
• Participated as a developer/alpha tester on the GNATS 4.0 release.
• Developed a suite of small utilities to aid software development. These included wrappers around the configuration management system (CVS/Perl), localised C/C++/Java language support in the Emacs editor (emacs-lisp).

CapeCom Malawi: March 1998 - January 1999

Role: Internet Entrepeneur

Established a portable Internet Cafe using an Inmarsat satellite telephone and PC in Cape Maclear, Malawi in Central Africa. Internet services were provided through the government ISP MalawiNet and an Australian ISP via a radio telephone and the satellite telephone respectively.

Achievements:

• Provided telephony, email and web services for tourists/backpackers
• Provided business services (email/fax & web design) for businesses in Southern Malawi

Travel Southern & Central Africa: May 1997 - February 1998

Telstra (formerly Telecom Australia): May 1993 - May 1997

Contract Software Engineer in various roles with the Customised Software Solutions Centre (CSSC). Involved in developing a generic Intelligent Network platform for the implementation of advanced telephony services. These included Telstra's Customnet 13, Telecard, Homelink, Auto-Australia Direct (AAD), PhoneAway and InfoCall 1900 as well as a prototype Universal Personal Number service. Software was developed in C++ using the OTC Software Environment class library and in Perl.

Role: CustomNet 13 Test Engineer - CSSC Wollongong - May 1993 to November 1993

Achievements:

• Developed test designs for the CustomNet 13 software modules and performed testing using call generators and protocol analysers
• Developed installation scripts allowing the software to be installed directly onto production machines.

Role: Support Engineer TSAF - CSSC Sydney - December 1993 to February 1997

Achievements:

• On-site installation of Sun workstations, Sco Unix PC's and Tandem Non-Stop UX fault tolerant machines
• Provided or organised the provision of on-call support for the TSAF software. The software was installed in two major sites (Sydney and Melbourne), in addition to 30 smaller sites around the country. Established a business hours help desk for the software.
• Repaired software and configuration problems on-site.
• Monitored performance using Perl by collecting statistics from the operating service to both find faults and to identify performance bottlenecks.
• Co-authored a proposal to replace the high cost Tandem machines with low-cost redundant hot-swappable Sun machines to reduce downtime. Developed changeover procedures and supervised the nationwide changeover.
• Developed software and procedures to simplify the software installation process. Installation time and operator errors were reduced by an order of magnitude
• Designed and developed a daemon in Perl which monitored the state of the system and restarted system management processes after any software or hardware failures.
• Participated in the high level design of the next generation of the system, particularly with regard to the external interfaces: telephone customers, customer service operators, system operators, charging, billing, customer database and alarm management systems. Negotiated design details with groups within the company responsible for these interfaces.
• Supervised technical writers in bringing support documentation up to date. Provided internal training courses to operations and support staff in the use of the system.
• Developed Quality standards for the support component of the software lifecycle. These included system release, patch release, provision of on-site support and the concept of experimental release. These standards were approved by Standards Australia, and CSSC was accredited to AS3563 with respect to these procedures.
• Designed and implemented software installation, configuration and support procedures utilizing the SVR4 packaging system.

Role: Systems Programmer - CSSC Sydney - February 1997 to May 1997

Achievements:

• Upgraded parts of the development environment, in particular the Emacs/XEmacs editing environment. Developed editing modes for local quality tasks such as status reports and defect reports. Integrated the editor with the Defect tracking system DDTS.
• Augmented the intranet web pages with guides for developers to in-house and external CASE tools.
• Developed various procedures and tools for developers upon request.
• Performed general system administration duties.

Unix Automation: May 1993 - June 1993

Role: Software Engineer

Achievements:

• Designed a simple network protocol to be used by transputer chips on an intelligent Programmable Language Controller being designed by Unix Automation.

University of Sydney: Jan  1991 - May 1993

Role: Associate Lecturer

Undertook general teaching duties involving preparing and presenting lectures and tutorials. Involved with restructuring many of the department's courses with a view to integrating them more closely with new directions in industry and research.

Achievements:

• Computer Graphics: Redesigned this popular third year course. Developed and delivered tutorials taking students with no knowledge or experience in Computer Graphics through elementary geometry through to ray-tracing, interface design and graphics standards. Using Bell Lab's Plan 9 graphics library (built on top of the X11 Release 5 Toolkit), designed and developed solutions to assignments for the course including a simple MacDraw style drawing program and a sophisticated program for 3D polyhedra modelling using scan line drawing techniques.
• Computer Science 1: Responsible for the redesign of first year tutorials. Tutorials were given by staff associate lecturers and up to 20 casual tutors made up of honours and postgraduate students. Previously, tutorial material had been at the discretion of the individual tutor which gave rise to serious inconsistencies in teaching. In response, weekly tutorials were prepared which reflected the material being presented in lectures and were also tied to the practical work the students were undertaking. Planned and delivered weekly teaching seminars to tutors. Identified and assisted struggling students through voluntary "catch up" sessions on evenings and weekends.
• LINDA: Prepared and delivered a series of seminars on the LINDA language extension to members of the Australian academic community in addition to configuring and installing a C language version of the extension in the department.
• participated as an active member of both the Software Systems Research Group and the Concurrent Programming Special Interest Group. Undertook several projects within those groups.

Flinders University of South Australia: Part time 1990

• Tutored 1st Year computer science and undertook lab supervision and student consultation.