The vision has grown, and I've jumped on board to help take the existing tools such as Webscape and Payrun.IO and turn them into a full Payroll Management system, not just for us at Payescape to provide a fully managed service but also with self service portals for our clients and their employees to have as much or as little hands on control as they wish.

Having developed in my spare time an Angular 8 front end and asp.net core 2.2 web api layer to provide a dedicated UI to the excellent PayRun.IO Payroll Web API, I am now contracted to Pay Escape Ltd, based in Northen Ireland, to write some integration and extensions to the core product for their specific needs as a rapidly growing Payroll Bureau.

Since January 2015 I've been working on PaySuite, the advanced Payroll option for subscribers to Quickbooks online (Intuit Ltd). This project continues to be really interesting and stretching both because of the intricacies of Payroll (definitely not to be underestimated) and the sophistication of the solution itself.In order to ensure PaySuite gets it's sums right year after year, we use an agile approach based on test driven development (TDD), without which it simply would not be possible.We use Teamcity for continuous integration, and Octopus for deployment. Github to hold the repository, NUnit and Resharper for the unit and integration tests, Specflow for the Behaviour driven Developement tests (BDD).Architecturally we make use of Windsor container for Inversion of Control (IOC) and as the basis of our dependency injection in production. For DI in our unit tests we use Rhino Mocks. For the front end we use the MVC Pattern, which is completely separated from Entity Framework and the business logic with a robust service layer.

I'm currently contracted with Ultra Electronics in Cheltenham building some tools to help get their new Cyber Protection Group up and running. Can't say too much about the project but it's certainly very interesting and means I'm now security cleared again.In keeping with the cutting edge nature of the project we're using the latest Microsoft stack: VS2013, ASP.NET MVC4, Entity Framework 5. Database wise we're using Sql Server 2012 in order to take full advantage of code first migrations which really helps as we are definitely heads down in Rapid Application Development!In production we are planning to use MySql so it's been good to spend some more time with that, bringing my experience up to date with MySql 5 and the rather excellent MySql Workbench 6.

What fires me up is harnessing technology to make winning businesses. Following on from the success of our CSR tool for Enterprises, the team and I are working on a Business Intelligence tool.Success comes from making effective decisions with the information at hand.

As a director of a small company you take on all sorts of responsibilities of course, from HR to taking out the compost bin.Primarily, as Operations Director I've been working on our policies and procedures, sorting out our accounts management, debtors and creditors, cashflow & monthly management accounts. I've implemented and overseen a radical overhaul of our project management process, and this aspect of our service is now regarded as a very positive differentiator by our clients.

I have developed and project managed two enterprise level applications whilst at UE. One an environment health and safety collection and reporting tool for Smiths PLC, the other a health and safety training delivery and reporting platform used by several large investment banks.

A varied role, involving lots of innovation. My first project was to develop a much improved machine control interface across the product range for the large format digital consoles.After that I worked on ideas for a new concept in post production digital workstation which got me involved with the open source ardour project and various linux kernels.My final project was working alongside a colleague to develop an 8 channel surround sound "internet" recorder, based on the linux platform and our own hardware sound card, that allowed engineers to record up to 8 channels of 96k 48bit audio and have those files synchronized via an intermediary server to other connected netboxes (as they were known) at other facilities so that mixes could be played back anywhere with minimal time lag. Sending 100mb files across a 56kbit leased line presented challenges!!

I travelled around the world training Sound Engineers, often owner operators of small independent studios but also various levels of staff at large Broadcasters, one to one and group sessions.The equipment was complex and often needed a fair amount of configuring and customising for particular customer requirements and ways of working.

At the time the ultimate job for me, boys toys on steroids, as much chocolate, beer, and haagen dazs as I could eat, fun people, my first session was with Tom Baker, and I worked with umpteen heroes such as Rowan Atkinson, Alison Steadman, Steven Fry and Hugh laurie, Jane Horrocks, I even did Alexander Amstrong and Ben Miller's original voice artist demo tape!On the technical side I had all the best sound recording, sampling and editing equipment money could buy to play with, and had my first experience of Solid State Logic in the form of a Scenaria/VisionTrack and later an Avant.