CV

Hey, I'm Dan! This is a responsive website to visually summarize my skills, education and work experience.
In the footer there are various links to download my CV, contact details and interesting third party content.

Skills

Education

University of Manchester

Computer Science BSc

University of Manchester
September 2008 - September 2011

Roles

2022
Sept 2021

Contract Go Engineer

Dojo / Paymentsense Ltd

10 months

The project so far has involved feature development, bug fixes and microservice migrations to GKE, the GCP Kubernetes ecosystem. I split my time between working on Go development, a small amount of TypeScript development and system architecture (planning). The backend is all Go and Typescript, with TeamCity CI pipelines pushing to GAE. The new ecosystem is based on CircleCI pipelines pushing docker images to GCR; then using Helm charts to deploy them to GKE.

Nov 2018

Contract Software Engineer

Mercari US / Mercari, Inc

2 Years 11 months

My role involved backend software development on the Go gRPC gateway and microservice architecture running on GCP/GKE. They used continuous delivery with CircleCI pipelines to create GCR docker images. They were deployed to GKE via Spinnaker. Permissioning and infrastructure were managed by a large terraform project, with GitOps being at the heart of all development.

March 2017

Lead Software Engineer

Mercari UK / Mercari Europe Ltd

1 year 8 months

Day to day I worked on the core api, it was built on a basic MVC PHP framework called DietCake. This acted as an “api gateway” for their native and web apps. I also founded numerous sub-system microservices which were built on Symfony3 and Golang. The majority of data was persisted to a master/slave configured MySQL Database; but caches (Redis/Memcache), NoSQL (GCD) and search (SOLR, Algolia) were also leveraged based on use case.

April 2016

Chief Technology Officer

Octer / Shareight Ltd

11 months

After 18 months of consultancy with Octer, I was appointed their CTO to help manage the refactored event centric platform; and mentor the small engineering team with growth plans. My new leadership role was heavily devops centric though, in order to free the rest of the team to focus on service development. Their platform revolved around a Jenkins CI build and manual approved deploy pipeline. They operated dozens of VMs and LXC containers running LAMP/LEMP/ELK stacks.

Sept 2014

Contract PHP Developer

Octer / Shareight Ltd

1 year 7 months

While working here as a consultant, I worked on various distributed microservices operating mostly on siren Json hypermedia REST pattern, XML queued feed downloaders and supporting the re-architecture of their monolithic startup codebase. The majority of the new refactored code written was in the Symfony2/Symfony3 framework (PHP5), numerous caching, queue and storage engines were in use… with the support of third party bundles and libraries.

Mar 2013

Senior PHP Developer

Sunny / Think Finance Ltd

1 year 7 months

My role at Think Finance involved working on their monolithic api application running on the somewhat infamous Zend 1.0 framework. Back when snake case class names and SVN versioning where the common approach. The role also leaned on some of my basic frontend skills with jQuery/jQuery Mobile, HTML/CSS, responsive sites and mentoring junior developers on the team. I left just as they were considering an upgrade to PHP5.6, which was long overdue.

Sept 2011

Junior PHP Developer

StrategyEye / Market Clusters Ltd

1 year 7 months

My first full time position in London, it required me to use my PHP skills honed during part-time University studies, to resolve bugs and expand the monolithic api application built on the Zend 1.0 framework. Alongside this we began prototyping a new product built on Symfony2; which really springboarded my career into Symfony development.

Dec 2008

Junior PHP Developer

Orchard Hosting / Orchard Internet Ltd

2 years 7 months

This was a part time role whilst I was studying for my CompSci degree in Manchester; it involved mostly maintenance on their buggy billing and system maintenance tools. The limited greenfield development on offer, was on an in-house CMS built on the Codeigniter PHP framework and Rapyd, a lightweight CRUD library for building WYSIWYG editors.

2008