Adam Purcell Email & Phone Number

Crawley, England, United Kingdom

Crawley, West Sussex

WFS took the decision that the AirData team were not 'core' to their business and laid off the team of eight people, though giving both ourselves and our customers several months' notice.Our largest customer, Monarch Airlines, spent some time looking at our competitors in the market but came to the decision that we were still the best and decided to take on five of us (all of the technical staff but, sadly, not the customer support staff) to continue our work directly for them.The necessary software was licenced and cloud systems reassigned from WFS and I continued to maintain and enhance, still single-handedly, the 'MetSystem'. As before, this was hosted on Amazon's AWS, using EC2 and ELB, along with SQS and S3 to distribute the work loads and RDS PostgreSQL for most datastorage (with some S3 storage, as appropriate).The systems were all built using Python 2, increasingly moving to Python 3 during this period, and providing APIs for both data and services to external systems. Initially all such APIs were built with SOAP, using Spyne, but increasingly we were moving towards more RESTful solutions, using CherryPy and Jinja2. Much use was made of the Boto libraries to better leverage the AWS infrastructure.Sadly Monarch Airlines rather publicly failed on the 1st of October 2017, bringing to a close a long and fulfilling chapter in my career.

Crawley, West Sussex

By far the longest appointment of my career, changing significantly over the years. As part of a small team of generally less than a dozen people, trading under the subdivision name of AirData, we build software and services for the airline industry. Most notable was the AirPlan software for flight planning.Initially I was brought in as a Borland Delphi developer to build Windows applications, which was very much my passion at the time, though as with much of the industry, we quickly left it behind.In 2002 I took on the additional responsibility of maintaining and enhancing all of the back end systems, what we called the 'MetSystem'. This was initially a conglomeration of Linux based systems that I managed in our own server rooms. The most important functions being the accumulation and dissemination of third party data (from providers such as the MetOffice and Eurocontrol) to be used by our customer facing systems and services. The inherited parts of this system were built on C and BASH scripting plus flat files for data storage and used dial-up modems to send data to our systems on customer sites. Over the years I rewrote much of the software, in Python, to use PostgreSQL databases and FTP for data transfer.During this period I also designed and built out two co-location installations, using such tech as Cisco Catalyst, PIX and ASA, bonded network interfaces, Dell PERC and PowerVault.From 2014 through to 2015 I was tasked with moving our entire back end infrastructure to the cloud, namely Amazon's AWS. As part of this effort I performed a ground up rewrite of all systems. The codebase was entirely shifted to Python and utilised EC2 and ELB instances, SQS and S3 to distribute the tasks more cleanly between properly defined clusters and using PostgreSQL RDS as the main datastore. Transmissions were rearchitected again, this time replacing the troublesome push mechanism to a SOAP based pull one.

Hove, East Sussex

Joined Pavilion to provide Software development skills within Delphi and Interbase development environment. Many projects were developed as Bespoke applications which required a level of administrational awareness in recompilation and bug checking. Responsibilities and projects included:Restructuring user interface design and back office processes.Removal of ‘hard coded’ solutions and implementation of customisable templates in the form of HTML and Report Builder templates.Implementation of Relational Database concepts within core application databases.Moving towards COM (Common Object Model) implementation of Applications to help in providing the structured development environment.Introduced Linux and Intranet technology with Apache and PHP Internet tools using a PostgreSQL database backend.

Crawley, West Sussex

Recruited shortly after completing my Degree I was asked to investigate and define the most cost-effective methods for implementing a Fax on Demand application as a product to be sold by First Fax. First Fax provided Bespoke CTi (Computer Telephone integration):Developed a Client Server system based on NT 4.0, MS SQL Server, Dialogic ISDN Cards and Gamma Link Gamma Fax cards using Inprise Borland Delphi.Development of a corporate Internet site using MS IIS, and Active Server pages to provide a local online listing of Businesses, formerly available for viewing at www.globalpages.com.

Brighton, United Kingdom

Took time out of University to develop back office applications, initially in Visual Basic 3. Later I became part of the team who evaluated PowerBuilder 3 as a replacement for VB on medium sized projects. Developed a several small projects ranging from screen-scraping front ends to a full blown multilingual booth based questionnaire system for an international conference at Barcelona.Helped introduce PC software development to a traditionally COBOL department.