Alan Christensen Email & Phone Number

Christchurch, New Zealand

(Contract role 2-3 days a week) Designing the Skilitics Interact e-learning platform. Custom framework and runtime designed for horizontal scalability of development through self contained components and scalability. Not general purpose as specific to e-learning but an interesting challenge all the same. Cross platform including mobile, web, VR etc with logic and state shared between yet custom native UI. Visual authoring tool.In early days, a lot of analysis and modelling work followed by a reference implementation. Then assisting the team in developing the production system based on this, particularly with architectural and design guidance and coding the majority of the difficult runtime pieces.

Christchurch

(contract role one day a week) Helping out with recruitment, hand-over and induction, business analysis and architecture.

Christchurch, New Zealand

Joined another start-up reporting directly to CEO and leading a development team. A key challenge was having to wear may hats, often changing them several times a day, from architect, developer, BA, product manager, scrum master, etc. Challenging environment of regularly changing priorities.* Regularly discussed business, management and product strategy with CEO.* Took on lead BA hat many times when starting a new feature as no-one else to do it, ongoing teaching process for team.* Held in tension changes in business priorities with momentum and morale in development.* Regular presentations to whole company to lay out plans or explain or demonstrate achievements and reasons for decisions. Explaining technical concepts to non-technical people regularly noted as a particular skill.* Developed and fostered strategy (architectural and process) of gradually replacing legacy/rushed code with well-factored code while still adding new features. Typically this involved leading the way in solving the key problems, coming up with better approaches.* Spearheading from BA to architecture to release planning and development of a new modular platform approach. This is still ongoing but it has tremendous potential and well ahead of other e-learning industry players.* Automated deployed AWS infrastructure including VPC, EC2 instances using Fabric and CloudFormation.* Solved architectural challenge of incrementally adding new features via JavaScript to a complex rich UI written in ActionScript/Flex.* Introduced many modern development practices such as CI, TDD, release automation, story definition and acceptance criteria.* Led initial development of greenfield analytics product using Node.js, MongoDb, Hadoop and Postgresql

Christchurch

Brought in to productionize the Electric Garden product. Three days a week initially, slowly reducing until handover.* Automated identical environment deployment to Azure using Terraform for infrastructure.* Converted existing Nodejs/Express back end to Typescript and added tests.* Helped with design of new features of web app and developed them front to back. React and Typescript with Redux front end, Nodejs/Express back end on Azure Functions, CosmosDB (via Mongoose).* Played web designer implementing Figma designs into HTML+CSS with react and styled components.* Designed and build small learning platform for in-house authored content including interactive questions of various types. Using React and MDX with some custom pipeline code.* Set up data injest pipelines for Electric Garden devices feeding from two different field device sources (Lora, CAT-M) into Azure Event Hubs, to queues, written to Cosmos* Built separate public facing smaller app for QR code access on mobile, .NET Core and Azure SQL back end.

Christchurch

Contract role on greenfield project for Census 2018 Manual Intervention (error correction). Varied from 2-3 days a week.* Designed and built system, 90% front end code with React, Redux, TypeScript, reselect, storybook etc. Back end .NET Web API and SQL Server using synchronous CQRS approach, extensive e2e automated tests and some use of SpecFlow.* Took evolutionary architectural approach, building capability to the core system on demand as new features being added needed it. Those capabilities then able to be utilised for later features.* Lead project to revise and integrate for continuous use in processing of international traveller arrival cards (for tracking net migration). System was flexible enough to be applied to this unplanned application without fundamental change.

Christchurch

Assisting team getting up and running and building large React based UI with TypeScript and Redux. Generally one day a week but variable. Generally solving hard problems. Remarked from dev manager how I was able to pick up where left off each week.* Replaced the build system with one based on react-scripts for low maintenance and easy upgradability (proved valuable as later quickly upgraded to 2.x).* Introduced new libraries and techniques with better type checking and less boilerplate with Redux, calling back-end API.* Introduced use of reselect library for dealing with the complex data structures and calculations for the large forms needed.* Mentoring and teaching on React best practice and how to develop complex components test first (TDD).* Assisting with more advanced code re-use and nested forms scenarios especially where higher order components (HOC) were needed.

Christchurch

Quit full-time role to properly try my own start-up project (http://auctionready.co.nz). The original start-up idea was pitched at Chrischurch Start-up Weekend 2014 and won the grand prize (as Houseintel).* Building relationships and eliciting feedback from industry players* Devising a unique "sinking lid" cost sharing business model that was win-win for all parties* Developing a public facing website and content (auctionready.co.nz). React, Redux, ES6, Jekyll. Web API back-end with SQL Server.* Developed Admin UI for supplier/internal use. ASP.NET Web API, React, TypeScript* Front end hosted on AWS S3 and Cloudfront. Back-end hosted on AWS EC2, ELB, RDS with Code Deploy and AutoScaling, continuous deployment with gitlab CI.

Christchurch

Joined start-up business prior to beta launch. Got involved where-ever greatest need. Main contributions in development infrastructure, tools, automated deployment and testing, architectural challenges. * Replaced problematic TFS and Team Build with much more productive TeamCity with Git and Github. Added CI build, auto-deployment build to dev and test environments. Introduced Rake based build script subsystem.* Built complex automated deployment system from scratch (similar to Octopus Deploy which was in early stages then) for regular (2 weekly) live releases including database, windows service, website upgrades. Various powershell administration scripts.* Single handedly retro-fitted database sharding so live infrastructure could be scaled horizontally. Massive architectural challenge touching a lot of existing code did not cause problems post release. Designed so sharding concepts hidden in background infrastructure code.* Ruby scripts for anonymising of production database for testing purposes. Initiated automated web testing with ruby/RSpec and Capybara. Used thin layer of abstraction to prevent brittleness.* Mentoring of other developers particularly around design and architecture. Hosted several brown bag sessions.* Stand out product contributions included implementing billing system integrating with external Chargify SASS service and migrating image storage transparently to Amazon S3.

Christchurch, New Zealand

On returning to NZ joined scrum team reworking web based HR product suite to a re-hosted Windows Workflow 4.0 back-end. Stayed a short while but left a legacy of a testable code base.* Developed automated acceptance testing examples over the existing code. Previously this was not thought possible on this code base.* Mentored other developers in the team, especially in the way of OO (e.g. SRP),TDD and newer .NET framework 3.5 and 4.0 features. Paving the way for automated testing was my key legacy as it was continued after.* Identified a Workflow versioning issue, investigated and wrote up a paper detailing the issue with potential solutions and, with the team, recommended one of these. This document was well received (my recommendations were actioned after I left).* Identified and listed key technical debt areas and recommended solutions. Addressed several of these areas, the largest of which was replacing a service-locator based multi-tenancy framework with an IoC container approach. This change greatly simplified the application code and surfaced a number of unforeseen issues that I had to solve along the way.* Initiated and provided guidance and assistance introducing, designing and developing a CI build, test and automated deployment packaging process to solve a number of on-going issues.

Leeds, United Kingdom

Leeds, United Kingdom

Sydney, Australia

Wellington, New Zealand

www.legislation.govt.nz website, front end, back end and legislation rendering engine.

Wellington, New Zealand

Senior team member designing and developing new online end-to-end publishing platform brookersonline.co.nz using .NET 1.1/C#, XHTML, XML, XSLT, AJAX, REST, MVC, SQL Server 2000