As part of a team of developers, designers, testers, business analysts and product owners, I am working to update all of the group’s e-commerce platforms to a common foundation. I apply my years of experience with e-commerce to supporting other team members and to making the new platform the highest quality possible, while continuing to support the existing Noel Leeming website to perform well with more than six times the usual number of orders during the COVID-19 lockdown.

As the Noel Leeming e-commerce site became more popular with consumers and the company required more from the software, I proactively improved the software to support even greater traffic, with more effective caching in multiple layers from the Cloudflare CDN to the application code, and with code and configuration changes to allow the application to be distributed across multiple servers, for nearly doublethe sales from one Christmas to the next.

With increased focus on the Noel Leeming e-commerce site, my team applied agile development approaches to keep the software up to date with the vendor’s releases while adding new features, including a complete redesign for the company’s updated branding, and implementation of the Adobe Experience Manager CMS to allow more effective marketing. Over four years, my team helped the site to support a four-fold increase in sales.

While leading the maintenance and new development of the group’s e-commerce sites, following the 2011 Christchurch earthquake I helped to establish more resilient core systems, with a migration from on-site Lotus Notes for email and Sametime chat to Google Apps with Gmail and Postini. In 2012 I participated in Scrum training with the rest of the group’s developers, and I have been using agile approaches to development for improved productivity and communication since then.

With a small team, I helped implement the front-end, back-end and integration for the first Bond+Bond e-commerce site using Elastic Path, and the migration of the Noel Leeming e-commerce site to the same software, with the number of customers more than doubling during this time. I also took the lead in the conversion of the PC Point of Sale (POS) software from DOS to Linux, allowing its use on modern POS hardware.

While continuing to support the Noel Leeming e-commmerce site, I worked on a project to upgrade the PC Point of Sale software from a 16-bit to 32-bit DOS application, including converting SNA intersystem communications to HTTP REST APIs and WebDAV. Despite challenges including a rewrite of part of the Watt-32 TCP/IP stack, this project was very successful at letting developers write modern C++, and letting the company use standard TCP/IP networking without needing to maintain SNA support.

As a junior programmer, I worked with the team maintaining the back-office systemsfor Noel Leeming and Bond+Bond using IBM RPG on an AS/400, including workimproving SNA communications with the PC Point of Sale systems. I then moved into a small, cross-functional team responsible for designing and implementing Noel Leeming’s first e-commerce online store using IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite, a role which needed me to collaborate across the business and develop Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE) software using EJBs, servlets and JSPs using an MVC approach.