Ewan Mellor Email & Phone Number

Seattle, Washington, Us

Various freelance software engineering contracts in iOS, using Swift and Objective-C. This includes two iPhone apps built completely from scratch — Unitive's eponymous app, and Food Kit by Diabetes Labs — and a significant second version of Aleatoric's PrimaVista.Various web contracts, usually using React frontends and Kotlin or Java backends with an ElasticSearch or MySQL database.Other contracts included DevOps, continuous integration, and infrastructure work with AWS, Docker, and Python.

San Francisco, California, Us

One of the original engineers building Sagetap's platform from scratch. It’s a 3-sided marketplace with serious network effects. Front-end is written in React and the web-tier and backend microservices are written in Kotlin + ktor running on AWS. In addition to building the core platform, I’m heavily involved in building the rest of the engineering team… to the moon 🚀

Tipbit was a startup based in Seattle and San Francisco. We built an email, calendar, and contacts app for iPhone and iPad, with search, indexing and management services running in the AWS cloud.I implemented the initial prototype from scratch, designed and architected the complete solution, hired, built and led the engineering team, and joined that team as a software engineer on both client and server software stacks.We used Erlang, Objective C, Java, Python, ElasticSearch, OpenNLP, Jenkins, Git, Logstash / Kibana, and lots more besides.

Fort Lauderdale, Fl, Us

I was responsible for developing XenServer's engineering strategy for cloud software. This included supporting OpenStack from its very first days (I wrote the first changeset in OpenStack that wasn't from NASA or Rackspace).I built a twenty-person team from scratch in three countries -- UK, USA, India. Together we ran a 24x5 agile development model developing OpenStack extensions for XenServer and our own OpenStack distribution.

Fort Lauderdale, Fl, Us

After Citrix's acquistion of XenSource, I went on to lead the XenServer Applications Group within XenServer Engineering.I led all engineering on the outside of the XenServer host itself: that means the user interface (XenCenter), ecosystem and partner integration including our relationships with Dell, HP, and Rackspace, open-source SDKs, and our cluster automation software (Workload Balancing).I was responsible for all aspects of that engineering group, including hiring, budgeting, project management, architecture, and software development.

Us

I was one of the team of people who built XenServer at XenSource (both before and after our acquisition by Citrix).I worked on the open-source Python toolstack (xend) for a little while, and then we built its replacement (xapi) from scratch in OCaml. xapi is now the foundation of the open-source Xen Cloud Platform project.I went on to lead the XenCenter team, building that product and team from scratch. This was a Windows-native client for XenServer, written in C#.In the early days, we drove many features from the user-interface down, and our front-end developers weren't really front-end developers, but were expected and encouraged to implement the API and backend services that they needed too. In later years, as the teams and products grew bigger, we reorganized ourselves into a specialist client-side team.We built a multi-tier continuous deployment system with automated UI testing. I18N was included from day one. We invested significant time in rendering quality and flicker-reduction, reverse-engineering the .NET UI libraries as we did so.We built a specialist UX team with an emphasis on simplicity of design, careful wordsmithing, and minimum surprise for our target audience (Windows-using IT pros). We handled UI documentation and online help from the same UX team, on the principle that if it was difficult to document, then that was a UX design issue, not a documentation issue!We shipped regularly and often, aligning our major releases with those of XenServer as a whole, and our minor releases as needed in between. We maintained a policy of backwards compatibility with old versions of XenServer, allowing us to push the client forward without forcing customers to disturb their infrastructure.The high quality of both XenServer and XenCenter were instrumental in ensuring our successful $500M acquisition by Citrix.

I was the sole engineer at RaMedia -- a very early-stage startup. I built a gaming platform for learning foreign languages through puzzles.This included a significant computational linguistics aspect, generating foreign-language text from abstract syntax graphs.It also used a novel system for modelling the user's memory, so that it could show puzzles that would always be tantalizing for them, and re-enforcing the knowlege that they had previously learned.

I joined FutureTV when they were a very early stage startup working on video-on-demand to televisions via head-end transmission systems and a set-top box. We could deliver video, music, internet, and email to your television, in the late 1990s. (The business eventually failed because we were too early and too expensive to deploy.)I led the user-interface team, working on page-generation technology built around our proprietary rendering language (this is back in the days when HTML wasn't an obvious option for embedded devices). We developed the full user-interface for the video-on-demand system, including on-screen browsing and an interactive program guide.