Builder.AI

I worked here for just shy of two years as a Senior Software Engineer. My team was mainly responsible for maintaining about 400 Rails engines - that is keeping their dependencies up to date, carrying out security patches, and making them compatible with latest ruby versions.

Apart from this, I worked on several other way more interesting projects that enabled other teams to do their work, like creating a custom build tool on top of Bundler, Rails templates, and a ruby AST parser used in the process of assembling a complete client application.

My favourite thing I built was a custom LSP server, which provided inline editor diagnostics for client projects, pulling data from various internal services - kinda like Neovim’s null-ls, but written in Rust, so obviously blazingly fast!

SilkFred

Quite the U-turn from my previous gig, SilkFred is a departure from the grievous corporate environment. There are no lengthy processes and just enough change management to be able to ship production code in my first week!

The typical SilkFred engineer is a senior with a ton of experience behind them. You’d often wear many hats - sometimes multiple hats at the same time! It’s not uncommon to work on a front end task one day and be buried in the tricky warehouse integration code on the next.

I helped implement their v3 redesign across the platform, shape up the new design system, improve their returns portal, and re-jig their Shopify integration.

HSBC (through Ignition Works)

I joined IW on the recommendation of a colleague I worked with in the past. It’s a small consultancy of ex-Pivotal engineers, who through vmWare, provide support for the CloudFoundry platform at HSBC.

During my short time at the bank I learned a ton about successfully running a PaaS at scale. It was massive - more than twenty different foundations, deployed over data centers in 3 different continents. Keeping north of 70K app instances alive and kicking is no joke and the brilliant team of engineers and dev ops at HSBC were doing a stellar job.

I was really lucky to be part of that team and get my hands dirty by making various improvements related to logging infrastructure, monitoring, scaling CF components, and general platform support.

Metropolitan Thames Valley

MTVH needed help moving their stack of Rails apps from being built by an agency to developing them in-house.

My role required transferring knowledge to the in-house dev team (capability building I think is the buzz word). I mentored and provided guidance to junior engineers, schooling them in various programming topics - both practical and theoretical, while taking part in regular sprint work.

I’ve extended my contract to oversee the completion of the transition, finish some important improvements on their residents’ portal, and onboard my worthy two senior successors who I also helped in hiring.

Caboodle Storage

Lot’s of fun there. These guys liked me so much they asked me to extend my contract twice! It’s a startup that ships boxes to your door, you fill them up and they take them away to a warehouse to be stored for a monthly fee. Neat.

My initial contract was to build their client-facing app. It turned out quite well and they suggested I build a bespoke warehouse app for them. This was a lot more fun as I got to integrate with Zebra RFID printers, tinker with UHF handheld scanners (and their utterly terrible chinese SDKs), develop an API, write a print server, and last but not least - drive a fork lift around.

During the second extension I went to the bitter end to get 97% on SiteSpeed. I also did the Stripe PSD2 migration (doh) and some other general maintenance tasks.

Plandek

Spent a year or so working with a great team on building an Ember app from the ground up. It’s essentially a business intelligence tool which gathers data from a bunch of sources and then allows executives to create interactive chart dashboards.

The engineering highlight for me was authoring a modular charting library on top of Ember components and D3. I needed a refresh on my linear algebra and Cartesian geometry knowledge but I did have loads of fun building it.

This project was directly talking to a Rails backend, which I helped maintain as well.

Artirix

My first proper Rails developer job. These are the people who built Globrix, which was later acquired by Zoopla. I worked on a bunch of different projects there, including search portals for DowJones’ property classifieds, EstatesGazette, BoatInternational, and a nifty startup which tackles rare diseases called RareMark.

Other things I was involved with were dealing with different data backends in Python, Elasticsearch (even Solr at some point, remember that?) and even wrote a small iOS eBay clone app with a colleague, but most importantly - I played lot’s of Fifa on the PS3/4, aahh the good old times.

Vertinity

This is where it all began. I don’t remember great details and honestly don’t really want to bring back memories of the days of IE6 support. Anyways, made lots of friends there and had great mentors while building all kinds of PHP websites for companies in various industries - big and small.