Qualifications

Richmond College (1997-1999) A – levels: Applicable mathematics Statistics/Discrete(A) Computer Science(A) Business Studies(A)

University: Imperial College, London, SW7 2BZ (1999-2004) MEng in Computer Science (First class honours)

Awards

Imperial final year Distinguished project award My final year project was selected as one of the best projects for the year scoring 86%. The project looked at taking conventional workflow management systems and applying cutting edge artificial intelligence research.

Imperial 2004 Henry Johnson Prize Awarded to students who have overcome adversity and have still achieved outstanding results.

Finalist in the 2004 Tanaka Business school challenge I lead a team of 6 where we developed and presented a real entrepreneurial opportunity. We had to produce a full business plan and presentation. I gain the opportunity to pitch to 5 of Europe’s largest venture capitalists. We were the only undergraduate team in the final competing against MBA students.

Finalist in the 2004 Global Lee Kuan Yew Competition BT award for best MEng group project

Experience

October 2009 – current Songkick (www.songkick.com) Working as an Application developer for a startup founded in 2007 focusing on live music. Messing with Kanban, obsessing about testing and having fun playing with Ruby, Python and Javascript.

January 2007 – 2009 eShopworks (www.eshopworks.co.uk) I was given the task of building a completely new web based content management system and the freedom to pick the technology/language for the solution. I decided on using Ruby on Rails. As well as being responsible for building the system and getting my hands dirty in the coding I oversaw the other members of the development team (5 developers). Through this project I learnt and then coached the developers and stakeholders on BDD practices through the use of tools such as Cucumber and Rspec. I became an active community member of both projects. I helped introduce and sell to the business, practices from agile and XP. I was responsible for attending and talking at Ruby/Rails conferences.

As part of my role I have interacted, managed and contributed to Open Source projects. I was also invited to become one of the core developers of Cucumber along with Aslak Hellesøy. Since accepting I have contributed several major features to Cucumber. ****

January 2005 – 2007 – eShopworks (www.eshopworks.co.uk) I worked as a technical architect on a web based content management system. Some of the areas I covered were Lucene based index searching, REST Architectures, extending Squid to handle private data, predictive caching, syndication engines and site user path/conversion tracking. Working on sites such as pukkaherbs.com, moneyweek.com, 32red.com, phaidon.com and lexisnexis.co.uk. The technologies used were Python, PHP, Java and JavaScript. ****

October 2005 – January 2005 – Privately Sponsored Project. I setup an enterprise after developing a proposal and securing financing. The project focused on artificial intelligence, specifically game theory. The project completed successfully and has been deployed in a live environment. The technologies involved were Python and C.

October 2004 – October 2005 – Lastminute.com (www.lastminute.com) I joined the graduate programme at Lastminute.com rotating around different departments. Some of the areas I worked in involved: Zope Content management system, Dynamic packing and workflow management systems. JSP, Python and Java were the main technologies used.

February-September 2003 – eShopworks (www.eshopworks.co.uk) I was responsible for establishing good software engineering principles in a young software company and working on research and development for their website content management system. I gained experience in all the processes of the software engineering cycle and the management of projects. I also learnt a lot about business practices and process such as protecting against liability. One of the larger projects I was working on was an oil pipeline avoidance system for Fisher German. ****

July-August 2001 – North West London Hospitals

July-August 2000 – Ealing Hospital

Summer placement July-September 2000 Traffic Proximity – (part of the Abbott Mead Vicker Group) (www.traffic.co.uk)

Summer placement July-August 1999 Wheel (formerly known as pres.co) (www.wheel.co.uk)

Computer Experience and Skills

Programming Languages (In order of experience) Ruby, Python, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Prolog, QuProlog, C, Haskel, Pascal/Delphi View Languages HTML, XML, CSS, Sass, RHTML, HAML, JSP Testing Rspec, Webrat, Cucumber, Shoulda, RR, Flog, Flay, Fixjour, Selenium, Watir, Celerity, PyUnit, PHPUnit, JUnit, ScrewUnit, Smoke Deployment nginx, Mongrel, Thin, Capistrano, Apache, Squid, ISS, Tomcat, Memcache, JBOSS Web/App Frameworks Ruby On Rails, Merb, Sinatra, Django, Pylons, Zope, Zend Framework, JQuery, J2EE Databases Informix, Berkeley, Postgres, SQLITE3, MSSQL, MySQL, CouchDB, ActiveRecord, Hibernate, SQL, JDBC Operating Systems Mac OS X, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Windows XP/Vista Agile practices TDD, BDD, Continuous integration, Scrum, Pair programming, Code reviews

Additional Qualifications and Skills

Elementary Japanese (International language house), Drama LAMDA Grade 1 Distinction: Grade 2 Honours.

Interests

Japanese culture and language, foreign films, Go, Chess, computer games, music with strings, literature, theatre, ballet, Open source, socialising and seeing the world.