United Kingdom #

Berkshire, UK #

Alwyn Infant School 1988 #

Managed and taught other children in the class BBC Computers and the Turtle to draw creative images on paper.

High Wycombe Software Development Agency 1994 #

Work experience placement to work on the Apple Newton device to implement the first wired ethernet networking connection to work with TCP/IP.

Altwood C of E School - 1992 - 1998 #

1994 Schools online project, Working with Anglia University for 5 schools being on the internet. Forums and BBS boards.
1996 Constructed an internal network of computers for the library, such that students can access curriculum content on the internet.
1996 When PCs weren't being used across the school network, I used their downtime screensave to process Seti @ Home data chunks from Berkeley.
1997 Visual Basic windows desktop application allowing teachers to input students grades to mail merge them into printing the reports over using pen and paper across the whole school.
1998 - Dual pipelined Silicon Graphics Vodoo graphics cards in SLI to compile custom video encoder in C -> Which is what CUDA is today.
1998 - A Levels, Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, (BBB)
1996-1998 Lighting director for Romeo Juliet production & Hexagon Reading performances

Nortel 1996 #

6 week summer work placement at Maidenhead. Networking infrastructure. global FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) connection with Canada and other offices. Upgrading routers with ARP tables via COM3 port interfaces.
Built their first internal Intranet using HTML 1.0/CSS, netscape 1.0.

Retail 1996 - 1998 #

Burger King - Achieved the fastest whooper burger making time whilst working at Burger King as a student.
Marks and Spencer - Checkout
GAME - 1996 - 1998, demonstrating the latest gaming setups, gran turismo (launch of PS), supporting customers with their PC games.

Compaq Computers (Tandem Computers) 1999-2000 #

Year In Industry program to work with Compaq Computers in Reading.
Excursions at universities for weekend training.
Automated Europe wide metric collections for their support centers.
European wide prep for Y2K Bug. Prepare for non-millenium bug New Years with multiple cellular and telecommunication fail over systems.
Implemented new Lucent telephoney moving from Nortel to digital VOIP across company.

Summer work - 2000-2003 #

2001 Glaxosmithkline packing toothpaste tubes.
2002 Sainsbury's night shifts.
2003 Teleresearch company on behalf of the government for climate carbon offset research.

Southampton, UK #

Southampton University 2000-2003 #

BSc Computer Science with Distributed Systems and Networking
Final dissertation was constructing a mobile phone application to use Java MIDP to analyze a road sign symbol and look it up Computer Vision techniques and a SOAP web based service for lookup.
SUSU.org - Built and managed students union forum and social software for 1000s of students.
Following from my Judo in 1990 I studied Hung Leng Kuen Fung Fu. Trained under Sijo Dutton for 3 years on all forms.
Worked with developers in 2003 to build AudioScrobbler contributing to Last.fm founders.
Lighting and sound director for SUSU.org events.

London, UK #

Complinet - Thomson Reuters - 2003 - 2007 #

KYC Sanction search service - Java based search system with a desktop and web client to search named individuals that are on international financial sanctioned lists.
Full Enterprise Dot Net desktop software for banks to run locally on their private network to process their customer databases. Harnessing research of Google One box, Cambridge Autonomy and raw custom Lucene indexing methods. (which today powers Solr, ElasticSearch)
Media Search service - Indexing 300k news articles daily and extracting names via Named Entity Extraction (NLP) to allow finding names that are mentioned along those that are sanctioned for clients such as GE Money, Deutsche Bank and Crédit Agricole.
Java Enterprise - Introducing Enterprise Java for global load balanced solutions and uptime. Worked on Javascript controls such as autocomplete and other early web 2.0 concepts for rich web experiences. Installing and setting up physical servers with openSUSE VM virtualization at Peer1 in Vancouver, BC.

Arrival Education - 2007 #

Co-founded Arrival Education, built software to analyze sales leads and indexing news data for sales lead opportunities.

Obimesh Consulting 2007 - 2011 #

DutchUncle - rebuild of leading illustrators of London and New York website to host optimized beautiful imagery.

SkillSwap - Online web service to allow innovators of London startup community to exchange services for free and barter exchanges. Allowing a marketer to perform work for a developer and the developer to get free marketing. Introducing a concept of tokens.

Twitterfeed - making RSS feeds update Twitter in real-time. Publishing 6m RSS feeds every 24 hours on a Ruby EventMachine driven stack over RabbitMQ.

Cookmarkit.com - Bookmarking service for saving recipes for families to ensure they keep their family recipe books going.

The RSA - Advisory on all future use of digital technology in Britain.

Social Innovation / FutureGov / Enabled By Design
2008 SICamp. AccessCity, Allow individuals to use their mobile phone to report un-accessible entrances and exits, for the TFL for improvement for the disabled.
Barnet Council digital strategy, advising Consverative party on Greater London Authority on open data. TweetyHall to put together social media from elected MPs
socializing with lovely people, me hacking in the back with the yellow and grey jumper

Guardian
Built a ruby library for their first open data platform
Open Data Platform Launch partner. Created a vertical search of music/film reviews with social media

JobsGoPublic - CTO - completing migration from Coldfusion to Rails with their development team. Introducing Agile software development practises and overhauling their DevOps.

Designed and wrote a full open data strategy for the Conservative party and the London Mayer Office for open data for the government and how citizens could contribute to the future of the government.

London Ruby User Group (LRUG) - 2008 - 2011 #

Ruby Manor - Organized and run a UK conference on leading Ruby and Rails topics.
Organized and spoke to developers in London monthly for a regular meetup on Ruby. Topics I spoke about were realtime web, event machine loop optimizations and async threading.

HopHive - 2009 #

Local news indexing service for neighbourhood communities.
Hophive - project to index all tweets and using NLP to extract out address context to connect stories for neighbourhoods. Working with Timeout / Guardian.

GoFreeRange - 2009 - 2011 #

Co-founded leading London Ruby development agency, GoFreeRangewith James Adam and Tom Ward.

Telefonica / O2 - Wrote a Ruby library for SMSCs to capture and forward SMS messages into an API, worked with TweetDesk

Mubi - Upgraded full web platform from Rails 2 to Rails 3. Optimized all aspects of the web platform for performance and fast development practises.

Chromorama - Created a fun game to allow individuals travelling on the TFL to plot their journeys with Oyster card taps and data APIs.

Alpha.gov - Designed and proposed software architecture approach to re-build all the UK government services with a unique novel approach using HTML/JS and Rails development to ensure all services continued to work and a whole new stack to be built. Developed correct business relationships and put together the right staff to lead the development at the UK cabinet office.

Voicenet - Hand wrote a Ruby library to construct automated VOIP handling of calls as a Ruby programmable DSL, similiar to Twilio.

PissWhistle - Based on IRC, chat based system using realtime connectivity for chat between teams, pre-Slack.

Canada #

Vancouver, BC. #

Kalv Consulting - 2011 #

2011 - DayDiary - Founded a product to store all your digital photos, notes, videos into a one feed diary. A service to store all your family memories.
2011 - RSS Hero - Founded RSS reading service, to index millions of RSS feeds for users to replace Google Reader shutdown. For those that wanted to read news articles via RSS and a social sharing service to allow collaboration on contextual subjects.
2011 - Investigating aggregation of all TV shows being watched for a one feed, working with latest Google TV platform released on Android.
2011 - Redhand - Making tablets security camera products. Allowing for capturing video footage and detecting movement. Built out the Rails infrastructure for the mobile client applications.
2012 - FamSnaps - a service to host photos and videos after MobileMe shutdown.

Caliper - 2011 - 2012 #

First JavaScript error collection and performance monitoring service for early JavaScript front end applications written in BackboneJS.
Working with early adoptors of Javascript application development such as RDIO and NewRelic.
Pitching to investors on Sandhill road such as a16z and Bessemer (BVP)

Brewhouse 2012 - 2018 #

Founded leading Canada Ruby development Agency. To work with growing tech companies such as Loft47, Clio, CommandWear & Mobify.

WeAreYVR - first online startup community and news site for YVR innovative, smart, itelligent companies.

Tantalus Labs - realtime chat service for cannabis farmers to discuss crops, prices and deals between each other. A slack for farmers.

Built and sold Goodbits.

Slack Later - the ability to queue reminders and messages to Slack Channels later.

VanRuby 2012 - 2018 #

Formed and ran ruby meetup that led to having 80-100 developers meet monthly. That spoke about topics of web development in Ruby and other languages such as JavaScript.

Creative Labs - 2018 #

Researching and developing prototypes for voice based assistants. Such that when a visitor arrives at a hotel a voice from Amazon Alexa would interact with the guest to share tourist attractions that the voice would suggest. Investigated possibilities of having celebrities such as Tom Hanks share his favourite locations that a guest would want to visit.

MailBatch - 2018 #

Fast web based Gmail client to work with keyboard shortcuts, snoozing emails to process later.

iQmetrix - 2018 #

CTO of north america's leading mobile wireless store infrastructure. Overhauled full architecture of POS, payment processing transactional systems, and engineering team structure.
Overhauled their company wide holacracy team structure with clear responsibilities for technical leadership and optimized meeting structures.

Holopod (startup) - 2019 #

Solo designed and constructued Holopod - MacOS client With facial recognition ML to set a 'making coffee' status to update in Slack for the future of remote workers.
Allowed teams like Telus and Netflix to allow their remote staff to improve their working environment.
Now part of the mozilla family.

Vision Critical - 2019 #

Formed VC Labs to create 3 new revenue growing products. A recurring business strategy model to discover and build new innovative products.

Shopify - 2020 - 2022 #

Formed and led the FED community across 2000 developers. Led React development, completed migration of full Shopify stack to React, largest TypeScript codebase known to Microsoft and Front End Design thinking. Co-led the direction of the largest Design Systems, Polaris

Led performance initiatives leading to reduction of all requests to Shopify web and API requests by 300ms.

Consolidated and unified all Shopify Mobile application development into correct business structure and strategy. Including migration to React Native engineering approach.

Overhauled all software developer role promotion and growth job matrices.

During pandemic, introduced correct practises for developers to work remotely ensuring they were happy and content working with one another with only Slack and Google Hangouts.

Created BFCM Radio, to allow all C suite individuals to live broadcast slots of innovation across the company to celebrate Black Friday / Cyber Monday, the largest weekend at the company remotely. Bringing celebration and joy to the whole company during the pandemic. Creating a yearly tradition to a remote first company. A lot of fun DJ'ing it.

Path.dev - 2022 - 2023 #

Angel funded startup to build an AI assistant to have developers interact with an AI people manager to assist them with the career growth. Harnessing work from Shopify career overhaul. Using latest AI question/answer services. Ensuring that developers could automatically capture the work they perform and allow their managers to not care about the people growth.

2023 - 2025 #

Travelling and researching computer science for future projects of Good.
Building prototypes with Apple Lidar, text to speech with under 80kb libraries, and faster optimized networking approaches for instant on live streaming .

Talks & Podcast #

1997 Future of Digital Britain organized by Tomorrows World.
2007 Amsterdam ApacheCon, birds of a feather discussion on Lucene/Solr creation
2008 Barcamp London - Multiple talks including RFID tracking, won a free iPod Shuffle.
2008 London Twitter Hack Weekend - Organized the first London twitter weekend hack weekend. Expanding on the use of metadata development on tweets and the adding of contextual information for relevant search results.
2009 RubyManor Conference 2 - Co-organized the conference
2010 LRUG November - Yet Another Chat Thing
2012 VanRuby - Async Rails processing
2012 HackHut - Talk on Intercom, sharing the importance of interaction with your customers for startup development
2012 Microsoft - Make Web Not War - HTML5 WebSockets & Server-Sent Sockets coated in Ruby
2013 to 2018 - Organizer of monthly leading YVR CTO uncorked dinner group
2014 CodeCore student presentation - Dealing with Clients
2015 Code n Coffee - Development team culture
2017 Microsoft - The future of conversational AI systems to interact with people, how computers will use this as the new method of UI
2018 - VanRuby - Deploying ActionCable - Implementing realtime web in Rails 5.0

Podcast
Hack the Entreprenuer - Breaking out of your comfort Zone - podcast episode discussing forming businesses