I am an Independent Member of Central Bedfordshire Council (CBC) representing the Aspley & Woburn ward, which is largely rural area with 2,000 homes and 3,800 electors. CBC is a Unitary Authority that spends hundreds of millions of pounds each year. I had always felt that my community was largely ignored by CBC and at the 2nd May 2019 Local Elections, I contested the Aspley & Woburn Ward as an Independent candidate. After a positive ten-week campaign, I received 78% of the vote on a 57% turnout, overturning a Conservative vote share of 75%.In the 2023 Local Elections, I received 90% of the vote on a 55% turnout.As an Independent councillor, during 2019-2023, I was able to challenge both the council's Administration and Corporate Directors in order to ensure that the views of residents were heard. In May 2023, the Independents became the largest group and I was invited to join the council's Administration as lead member for Finance, but that does not diminish my determination to ensure the views of residents are heard.I actively support my residents to ensure their aspirations are met as the council embarks on large scale housing development, whilst also ensuring we have an effective voice to deal with the challenges associated through bordering the Milton Keynes regional growth area.

For a large client in the insurance industry, ProofID was tasked with user registration and account management journeys around the Ping Federate product, deployed to AWS, integrated with a BGL REST API (Mulesoft connected to a legacy mainframe backend).I produced the Spring Boot application that integrated with Ping Directory (using Spring OAuth2) and Ping Directory (via Spring LDAP) to meet BGL’s requirements. The application provided REST services to a modern HTML 5 web based front end. I also championed the need to implement processes that improved transparency through code reviews and automated builds in gitlab.Whilst this was primarily a development and transformation role, I regularly met the client onsite to discuss requirements, discuss how the two businesses could work more closely and so on.

Building integrations to Ping Federate using Java Spring Security OAuth2, Python/Flask and others.Involved in the transforming an over-engineered "modern" Java web application to something approaching a modern technology stack. The (recently written) application had 7,000 lines of Spring XML, few tests, multiple microservices with no apparent purposes, and had defeated many good developers who simply moved on. Developers were resorting to "recursive grep" to figure out how this application worked, which was further hampered by 130 (!) properties files. It took 15 minutes to build with ant/ivy.We spent a year removing vast amounts of XML and replacing with annotations, modern tests, gradle, Spring Boot/Security, and so on. Build times dropped to 30 seconds, people understood how it worked, and feature development times dramatically reduced. Ultimately, I could complete the goal of a Ping Federate OAuth2 integration with "step-up" to perform various actions.During my time at MS, I was also involved in automating the deployment of Websphere builds and assisting with migration to Tomcat/modern Java stacks; building a modern application deployment platform to an internal Cloud product (called Treadmill) using Python/Flask and an AngularJS/Bootstrap front end.

Whilst working as the JEE architect in Nomura's infrastructure department, I assisted many application teams in porting their applications to a new datacentre. I was subsequently invited to join Equities IT to work on the high profile DNA-Allocator project, a FIX based post trade processor that is a conduit to many trade flows. The application was built on Weblogic 9 and many components required modernising, with the goal of making the application run on JBoss/Tomcat in addition to Weblogic.My primary task was to deal with the poor performance of the application by re-architecting to replace Weblogic EJBs with a standalone Spring/Hibernate solution. The new solution was ten times quicker than the old solution, with scope for much greater improvements in performance after the legacy JEE code had been ejected.

Nomura invited me to join their Web Technology team to assist in the migration of hundreds of Java based applications out of the ex-Lehman Brothers datacentres, whilst also providing best practice security advice to teams unused to running applications on shared hardware or through Internet facing infrastructure. The platform was written in Python and deployed to many (400+) Linux based VM hosts.

The FCO outsource the provision of their Service Desk to Hewlett Packard, who supply HP Open View Service Desk. The product has a Java API and HP required a web portal to be developed, offering a modern web interface to the client. I developed a framework for the portal with various implementations of Service Desk functionality, demonstrating how HP could use modern Java libraries for re-usable, low maintenance code. The technologies included Java 6, Spring 2.5 (largely involving Spring MVC), Spring Webflow 2, Spring Security, Dojo 1.3, JSTL, JSON/AJAX, and a Maven based build system. The project was deployed to Tomcat 6.While developing the project, I made a point of looking in detail at Spring Webflow and providing feedback to the user community given this Spring module is relatively new. I was also involved in providing training on best practice and support to my colleagues at HP.

I was contracted by the 'Web Single Sign On' team to lead the design and development of a web based reporting service for all single sign on related activities. The goal was to collect user authentication data from the bank's varies SSO gateways and provide a real time reporting service to provide application owners and system administrators with usage/load data, while also improving the team's compliance with the bank's various audit processes.

A change from Java programming; an outing into a corporate who were struggling to change. But a positive change in career, leading to a range of superb software solutions.

I was involved in the unenviable task of rewriting VB based products in Java, at a time when Java wasn't a polished product. I was involved in all aspects of the development lifecycle, from huddles around a whiteboard, to debugging (early) object to SQL mapping tools, to writing a Java web based application.Best summarised as 'learning a trade'​. Working with an SME, particularly at a time of serious change, resulted in an outlook on business that the average "straight out of Uni" corporate-employee is unlikely to grasp. Controlling costs; customer service; delivering solutions with a real purpose. Java was a very new technology in 1998 - it barely worked - but we put something together that was ultimately successful.