Daniel Wright Email & Phone Number

Principal Software Engineer on the Air New Zealand FACE (Future Aircraft Cabin Experience) project.Also Principal Software Engineer for the new IFE (In-Flight Entertainment) and In-Flight WiFi systems being deployed to the fleet.HIGHLIGHTS:Diagnosed inflight WiFi performance issues, and worked with our vendor to resolve them before Christmas rush.Joined the next generation IFE (In-Flight Entertainment) project to help turn the project around, working alongside our vendor we took it from an unusable level of performance and stability to a robust and reliable experience rich with animations and visual effects.

Auckland, New Zealand

As Principal Engineer for mobile I work across multiple projects simultaneously at different levels of engagement as required. On some projects I provide mentoring and high level guidance, on others I'm a full tech lead committing and reviewing code. On all projects I'm working to ensure we deliver the best experiences possible for our customers and staff.HIGHLIGHTS:Helping the Cabin Crew app grow in functionality, and get a voluntary adoption rate of 98% with CSAT scores as high as the customer app.Being able to deliver enough functionality in the Crew Mobile app that we can decommission an older, expensive third party mobile app.Setting the Mobile policies and standards with our governance panel, the first policies and standards to be approved in the organisation.Getting our React Native implementation of the Air New Zealand design system to the point where multiple developers were using and adding to it and it's functionality was approaching that of the already mature web implementation.Guiding a third party to rebuild our internal Staff Travel app in React Native following our patterns and practices, using our component and tool libraries, in only 3 months.

Auckland, New Zealand

Primarily working as front end technical lead for iOS and Android in the Crew Mobile team. Creating an all new digital experience for Air New Zealand cabin crew to streamline their processes and give customers better experiences.Additionally working with other teams to align mobile app development and deployment processes across the entire airline.Responsible for:- Tech lead and architect on Cabin Crew mobile app- React Native implementation of the Air New Zealand design system.- Code reviews of all React Native code commits- Setting code standards and best practices across all mobile development at Air New Zealand.- Unifying app architecture design for both iOS and Android across both native and React Native.HIGHLIGHTS:Established new ways of working, brought agile and rapid deployment to the enterprise space (already existed in customer space) and helped get key stakeholders bought in to the methodology.Introduced React Native to Air New Zealand, cleanly aligned it with the React web development already being done.Created React Native implementation of the Air New Zealand design system that is closely aligned to the existing components built for web, allowing web developers to transition to mobile easier. Established end to end automated build, testing, and deployment pipelines for internal mobile apps.

New Zealand

Worked as the technical lead for iOS and Android in the Application Digital Development team on the My Vodafone mobile apps, which are used by approximately 800,000 people per month.Responsible for:- Technical lead and architect of My Vodafone apps- Directing, mentoring and guiding 7 mobile developers- Setting code standards and best practices- Liaising with a variety of internal teams supplying us data / services- CI/CD pipeline creation and care- Code reviews of all iOS developer code commits- Code reviews of all React Native developer code commitsHIGHLIGHTS:Aligned user interface designs and branding across both Android and iOS whilst adhering to the design guidelines and native feel of each platform.Aligned native app architecture and approaches across both Android and iOS.Successfully delivered on a two week POC (proof of concept) for React Native. Instead of delivering the new design login screen and dashboard on mock data, it delivered the functionality fully integrated with our backend REST APIs.Assembled a team and rebuilt the mobile apps in React Native with a single codebase for both platforms, this codebase is still being used today (2020).Guided and helped create CI/CD (continuous integration, continuous delivery) pipelines for My Vodafone for both existing native apps and the new React Native apps.

Worked as lead iOS developer in the Digital Development Team on the My Vodafone mobile apps, which are used by approximately 800,000 people per month.Responsible for:- App architecture design- Refactoring of legacy code- Code reviews of all iOS developer code commits- Implementation of new features in sync with marketing campaigns- Liaising with a variety of internal teams supplying us data / services- App store deploymentsHIGHLIGHTS:Massively refactored and cleaned up codebase with 6 years of technical debt. Reduced compiler and static analyser warnings from 800+ to zero, resulting in 20+ long standing customer issues being resolved.Added crash reporting to the My Vodafone app, fixed 50+ errors customers were experiencing daily.Traced an authentication issue through to the production caching servers. Worked with the backend developers to help resolve it, which reduced login times from 20 seconds down to 4.Refactored entire app to remove custom navigation system and use iOS standard, resulting in both a better user experience but more importantly enabled VoiceOver for accessibility.Added multi-tasking and automatic re-authentication, so customers could jump in and out of the app at will.Added multi-threaded data fetching using GCD to multi-thread existing code, reducing load times from 12-25 seconds down to 4-5.Worked with Thought Works team to add Always On data caching to the app, resulting in customers being able to see services and balances when offline or when servers were down.

RECENT WORK:- Created webpages for the 2015 NZ Game Developers Conference. The centerpiece was the schedule that allowed people to filter and search through the sessions at the conference. The schedule was optimised to be responsive and work on any device from mobile to tablet to desktop. This required ongoing daily work in the weeks leading up to the conference to update the schedule data as speakers dropped in and out (due to availability) - including some emergency updates on the day of the conference due to last second line up changes (due to sickness).- Two month contract for an emergency rewrite of an iOS app for a camera company in time for their October hardware launch.- Four month contract working in ASP.NET and C# to convert and upgrade critical components of the core web portal product for a major insurance company.- Created complete design for a mobile app for use in store for a major New Zealand supermarket chain.- Worked with key developers in a local software development firm to convert their main website to be responsive and helped them redesign workflows to be optimised for mobile use.- Ad hoc contract work doing website and mobile app design reviews and UX improvements reports.- Ad hoc contract work converting design work in Photoshop and Illustrator to lightweight and responsive layouts using semantic HTML, CSS3 and javascript.

- Created a native iOS app for iPads that does inventory for the sales team at a large international online store to use at international toy fairs. The CEO was so impressed with the app he abandoned initial plans to trial the app with 3 users and instead equipped the entire 12 person sales team with the app for their most important sales fair of the year.- Created a native iOS streaming radio app from scratch in 3 days to meet a client imposed deadline. The app was branded consistent with the radio station branding and pulled current show content dynamically from both the audio stream and the station website.- Ad hoc contract work doing website and mobile app design reviews and UX improvements reports.- Ad hoc contract work converting design work in Photoshop and Illustrator to lightweight and responsive layouts using semantic HTML, CSS3 and javascript.

Put together a team of front-end and back-end developers, testers, business analysts and project manager to build and continue to evolve the Web Applications and Web APIs for QBE Insurance New Zealand. Combined these systems have processed nearly $2,000,000 of business at time I left.Designed and created a Web Services API that allows online registering of quotes, binding quotes into policies and generation of documentation. Subsequently worked with three separate business partners to tightly integrate support into their systems. This system is now processing over 200 new policies a day.Designed and created a web application for policies that enables brokers to get an online quote and then create a policy (both commercial and domestic) which instantly generates legally binding documentation, the first and still only insurance company in New Zealand to do so.Designed and created a web application for claims that enables that allows brokers to raise claims for any policy type, the first and still only insurance company in New Zealand to do so. OTHER HIGHLIGHTS: - Implemented automated deploys which dropped production deployment failures by 98% and gave us one click rollbacks for the remaining 2%.- Implemented continuous integration server with unit and integration testing using Team City and Specflow that became the company standard development and deployment methodology.- Designed user experience and workflows for our web applications to reflect industry specific business process, instead of being technology led. This resulted in workflows so simple that manuals and instruction were not needed.- Adapted company branding to work with our web applications. Our adaptations ended up being adopted and updated to be new online standards by the global marketing team for QBE.

Migrated a 9 person team from using VB6 + sporadic source safe usage to Visual Studio 2008 + Subversion + scripted deployment builds.Technology & Development Lead on the 18 month conversion of our core insurance system from bespoke mainframe to Windows platform.Re-architected the nightly extract to our data warehouse, working closely with a developer we mapped the existing largely undocumented processes then reorganised and rewrote them over a six month period. This resulted in reducing nightly processing time from 22 hours on 3 servers down to 3.5 hours using a single server.Initiated, planned and oversaw the two year migration of our data warehouse from SQL 2000 with Excel front end to SQL 2008 + Reporting Services + ASP.NET front end website.

Analysed then fixed complex internal mail routing and database replication, reducing email delivery time from 30 minutes down to 30 seconds causing my manager to state “In one day’s work you’ve justified your entire annual salary”.Created a CMS in Lotus Domino for the corporate intranet, including styling the client application to look like Blogger / Web 2.0 which an IBM rep described as “impossible” then “amazing”.Created a Lotus Domino application that imported a variety of storage box tracking spreadsheets then produced daily reports on which boxes had contents past the 7 year legal requirement and could be destroyed, saving the company $80,000 / year.Co-designed and then implemented an entirely new switched network with a multi-gigabit fault tolerant core and gigabit to the desktop.Installed and configured network monitoring system, including writing an interface to a cellphone to create a completely fault tolerant alerting system, which made us proactively aware of faults in our network and services which dramatically increased customer satisfaction.

New Zealand

Ran the seven person, second and third level support teams for the central city campus supporting 1,100 workstations through 10 buildings.Set up an mp3 radio station restreaming server, including getting permissions from all the stream owners for restreaming and convincing management that providing and endorsing the service counter-intuitively reduces our spend on bandwidth.Wrote a complete SPONG client from the protocol spec using VB6 with direct WIN32 API calls for a 2 MB memory footprint to replace the default Perl client which had a 30MB+ footprint.Wrote an app that took a list of users connected to the Novell Directory Service and made a Jurassic Park style set of maps of the buildings and rooms that show where someone is physically logged in based on a manually created database of MAC addresses.

Responsible for running the backup systems for the city campus, which include backups of servers running Novell Netware, Windows Server, HP-UX, AIX, Linux to various tape systems.Evaluated and tested a centralised backup system that allowed us to backup all these diverse systems to a single robot tape library.

New Zealand

New Zealand

New Zealand

One of two project leads converting a popular Amiga game to the PC, primarily responsible for converting core 68000 assembly language modules into 386 protected mode assembly language equivalents.I wrote drivers in assembly language for VGA graphics card, serial ports, keyboard and joysticks using information in the chipset manuals for each device so that I could provide an abstracted API for the rest of the team to use.

Diploma In Computing, Merit

Focused on software development with a minor in network + server design. Majority of papers were at merit level (90% or more), all papers.

Bachelor Of Business

Cross credited my diploma towards a Bachelor of Business degree, completed up to end of the second year to get a solid understanding.