David Carr Email & Phone Number

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Continuing in the .NET Team; retitled position due to organisational restructure. This period coincided with the commencement of the GVRS Hybrid project (building a new voter and election management product for AEC's international partners), along with the AEC delivering the first Australian Federal Referendum in a quarter century.- Involvement in GVRS Hybrid, a greenfields software project to replace the aging GVRS+ (Generic Voter Registration System) provided by the AEC in international partnership to Electoral Management Bodies in the Pacific. This project takes lessons learned from the old desktop-based product to design a modern browser-based solution that is maintainable, flexible and scalable through local, networked and cloud-hosted deployments. My responsibility was on the initial revised database design in Microsoft SQL Server, and I also gained exposure to several of the latest technologies including .NET 8, Entity Framework and Blazor while performing code reviews for my colleagues. This project was also the first implementing mature Agile project management practices in the agency.- The above project commenced to a dual backdrop of the Fadden By-Election in full swing, and preparation for the 2023 Federal Referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. While I was not involved directly on Referendum night, I did reprise my scribe duty through verification test, and provided monitoring and support of election systems including Online Enrolment Service (OES) and Online Postal Vote Application (OPVA). This included delivering critical fixes to OPVA for wording errors and data issues raised by the product owner, as well as responding to and post-mortem of a critical failure in downstream email services.- As I was concluding with AEC, a key focus was reviewing and updating wiki documentation and backlogs in DevOps, to ensure my SME knowledge is recorded and reference material on projects and processes is complete with no gaps for those coming after me.

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Continuation of the previous entry with slightly reduced hours and varied work pattern to balance work with family commitments. Obviously this also coincides with the Australia-wide shift to remote working during pandemic lockdowns through 2020 and 2021.- Recognised as SME for the Online Enrolment Service (OES), Online Postal Vote Application (OPVA), Image Repository (IRIS), and Generic Voter Registration System (GVRS+). Providing introduction and knowledge transfer to six new starters in the team.- Leading involvement in the OPVA Responsive Redesign and Accessibility project, which sought to update and modernise the UI (stagnant since 2012) in line with OES. I took the role of interpreting, organising tasks for other developers, performing code reviews, and managing releases through DevOps. We had to manage delivery of the changes around critical availability requirements for elections. The product was successfully delivered and attained WCAG 2.1 AA certification from Vision Australia.- Supported migration of applications (including principally OES & OPVA) to new internal AEC server infrastructure. Configuration and deployment of upgraded EntireX middleware supporting OPVA. Supporting load and capacity testing by preparing releases and documentation, and SME interpretation of results.- Principal resource for GVRS+, a software product provided to partner Electoral Management Bodies (EMBs) of Pacific Island countries. Contributed to upgrading the decade-old software platform, and provided ongoing feature development and support for the partner EMBs individualised instances. I developed a trusted relationship with the new BA who guided the direction of the product and design of its successor.- IT system support and scribe in the 2022 Federal Election, and By-Election events in Groom, Aston and Fadden. I was praised for the agility I demonstrated, stepping up to tackle different tasks, respond to unexpected situations or issues, and coaching other team members.

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Application Developer with the newly restructured .NET Team in IT Solutions, performing full-stack development across a variety of applications with C#, Razor, Javascript, SQL Server, and other technologies. I emerged as the SME for the Online Enrolment Service (OES) and Online Postal Vote Application (OPVA), which are significant public-facing services for the AEC. I received praise for my documentation, technical advice and interactions with the business areas during projects. I also became more involved in election delivery, including monitoring and event logging from the election night command centre when the national count results are published on the AEC's flagship Virtual Tally Room (VTR) website.- Contributed to modernisation projects for OES, updating the UI with Bootstrap, implementing dynamic address search function, and applying changes from WCAG accessibility testing by ATO and Vision Australia. These greatly enhance the user experience of submitting enrolment changes.- For legislative changes affecting Victorian enrolments, worked with business to produce the design for OES, and coordinated the release with GENESIS and mainframe teams.- Performance remediation of OES code for sending Receipt messages to the elector, bottlenecked at one sixth the target rate of 60,000 messages/min. The reworked solution achieved a 100X throughput improvement, resolving message delays for the 2019 Federal Election.- Scribe role in IT command centre for Batman By-Election, Wentworth By-Election, and 2019 Federal Election, monitoring and documenting for lessons learned.- Writing unit tests and documentation for the test manager.- Patching and testing in the AEC's cloud platform in AWS.- Evaluation and technical expert review of applications in competitive tender for paper scanning provider.- Adapting to new technologies as the team transitioned to Microsoft DevOps and Git source control. Grooming backlog work items and refining the release pipeline for OES/OPVA.

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Successfully applied for the position of Web Systems Analyst Programmer in the IT Solutions - Elections section. This team was responsible for maintaining a applications used for running and processing elections and BAU, primarily internal- and external-facing .NET Framework web applications written in C#.- Worked on the employee application for election workforce, completing a task to implement Single Sign-On (SSO) to the external training provider.- Performed maintenance tasks, including patching and testing releases, on the remote application platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS), gaining exposure to cloud hosting service arrangements.- Joined the GVRS+ (Generic Voter Registration System) project team, an international outreach initiative with the Electoral Management Bodies (EMBs) network of Pacific Islands nations, to provide training and management systems for running those countries' elections. At the training workshop attended by representatives of several member countries, I familiarised myself with and implemented updates and feature requests to the GVRS+ software, a C# WinForms application.This position was short-lived due to an organisational redesign at the end of 2017, which saw the formation of technology-focused groupings (Mainframe Team, Midrange Team, Java Team, etc.) with myself being placed in the dedicated .NET Team.

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Commenced as a developer with the IT Solutions - Roll Functions section, maintaining the applications used for managing enrolment data. These included GENESIS (General Enrolment Information System, an internal-facing Java 2 EE and SQL Server application integrating with mainframe programs), OES (Online Enrolment Service, a public-facing webform built on C#, .NET Framework and SQL Server which integrates with GENESIS) and IRIS (internal-facing image repository built on C#, .NET Framework and SQL Server). Some achievements are:- Worked on the address geocode conversion project in GENESIS, to align our database of 10+ million enrollable addresses with new data standards from the ABS and mapping authorities. The solution automated matching and boundary checking, saving an estimated 60,000 hours effort to manually encode every address in Australia.- Contributed greatly to coding the 'address trickle feed' in GENESIS, which keeps updated address data synchronised with the mainframe.- Worked on redevelopment of the IRIS solution to extend management options and types of content that could be stored. I wrote the design document for the new Content Management administrator frontend, implemented the agreed design alongside another developer, and trained the business users.- During the 2016 Federal Election, I was tasked with automating a manual status transfer command provided by the GENESIS web interface, as a stopgap to address poor performance of a backend queue causing status messages to electors to be delayed many hours. I succeeeded in producing a novel tool implementing Selenium Webdriver in parallelised virtual users, that was wildly successful in keeping the queue clear.- Contributed to upgrading the GENESIS server platform from Apache JBoss 4.2 to 7, primarily research and converting the integrated JMS message queue implementation to ActiveMQ.- Frontend development and testing in OES for enrolled address search and validation feature.

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Accepted into the APSC Graduate Development Program and commenced at AEC as an IT specialist. I completed four placements in different work units across the agency, plus an election placement, while also undertaking training and project work with peers across different government departments to earn my Diploma of Government. 2013 was also a Federal Election year, and I received first-hand exposure of the work the AEC does to coordinate the national vote, Australia's largest peacetime logistics operation. Finally, this also coincided with the start of AEC's journey with cloud-hosted services.Top achievements during my graduate year:- Involved (from the software development side) with the creation of 'IRIS', an in-house repository solution for the AEC's 50M+ enrolment document images. The specialist-designed solution is built on a SQL database, with C# and Powershell programs, optimised for large-scale storage and retrieval of relational content. The successful delivery of this project removed a key risk to the AEC's operations after the previous outsourced service provider had gone into administration in 2012.- Contributed to feature development in the backend management portal of the Online Enrolment Service (OES), a (new as of 2012) webform application built on .NET and SQL Server that enables members of the public to submit changes to their enrolment to the AEC via the Internet.- Involved (from the product owner side) with defining the business requirements for a new 'online signature' feature for OES. The delivery of this feature was an imperative before the 2013 Federal Election, due to the prospect of legal challenges if the AEC did not provide a sanctioned means for members of the public to submit a new enrolment online.- Directly assisting the ACT Australian Electoral Officer (AEO) through the 2013 federal election, with tasks such as verification of election materials (e.g. candidate lists), and overseeing data entry and scrutiny of ACT Senate votes.

Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia

Working with other researchers, I developed a prototype agent-based model (ABM) as the foundation for investigation into trends in house prices in the property market of Australian towns and cities.

Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia

Assistant to teaching staff for a range of programming and computer science subjects. I was given more autonomy and responsibility over my taught subjects and in particular was entrusted with updating the Java Concurrent Programming module and allowed to shape the DirectX game programming module. (Part-time/casual)

Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia

Assistant to teaching staff for tutorials and marking in computer programming subjects. I found teaching and assisting learners to be surprisingly rewarding. (Casual)

Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia

Private tutoring students in programming and mathematics subjects. (Casual)

Gaston County, North Carolina, United States

In the late 1990s and through the early 2000s, I was big into Microsoft's "Monster Truck Madness 2" (MTM2) PC racing game and the friendly online community creating custom tracks and vehicles (what would now be termed "modding") and playing in competitive multiplayer racing. In 2006, Microsoft closed their "Internet Gaming Zone" (the Zone) which provided chat and multiplayer lobbies for the game, leaving us without a gathering place for our online gaming. Community members approached providers of other online games services to host our game, and secured support with the newly emerging "Renaissance Games Online" (RGO) company. I programmed a custom lobby client to work with RGO's servers, allowing players to set up chat lobbies and launch peer-to-peer multiplayer sessions of MTM2, loosely recreating the Zone experience. This worked well and was well received by players in our community, with many remarking it was "just like the old days on the Zone". Unfortunately, internal politics and interpersonal drama within RGO eventually saw support ended, and the MTM2 community migrated to other less mercurial services for online play. (Gratis work)

Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia

In collaboration with another student in my undergraduate course, we co-developed and delivered a spelling game program we named "MagicSpell". The game was developed for Inala Special School, an educational facility for neurodiverse children in Brisbane, to replace a spelling game running on obsolescent Apple II-e hardware that the school relied upon. The gameplay loop consisted of a spelling quiz, the word list for which was configurable by the teachers, and a Space Invaders-style minigame as a reward. The game was well-received by teachers and students and fulfilled a need of the school for several years. (Gratis work)

Phd, Computer Science - Games For Teaching

Activities and Societies: B.R.A.W.L. (Bathurst Roleplaying And Wargaming League) Following completion of my Bachelor's degree, I accepted.

Bachelor Of Computer Science, Games Technology (Hons), Honours First Class

Activities and Societies: B.R.A.W.L. (Bathurst Roleplaying And Wargaming League) Awarded Charles Sturt University Foundation Honours.

Education record

Awarded Dux of School, 2000.