Note: In total I worked for 23 years with the organisation that today is Thomson Reuters, including the roles at Sweet & Maxwell and Legal Information Resources, although LinkedIn groups those separately.Thomson Reuters Corporation is a multinational conglomerate and is the world’s leading provider of news and information-based tools to professionals, including the Westlaw online legal research service for lawyers and legal professionals in over 60 countries. The Mytholmroyd site where I worked delivers UK legal content to Westlaw UK.Role summary from November 2018:• Following a major internal restructure, I was one of three staff members of an entire department retained to support the transition of their complex technology estate of in-house applications and server systems to new teams based around the world, so that ongoing business projects would continue to be delivered.• This included high level and sometimes deep engagement with a wide range of technologies and languages such as bash, java (including Spring), Delphi, MongoDB, Oracle, MySQL, JavaScript/typescript, python, various linux admin, vm server provisioning (including use of linux virsh), as well as technologies such as git, Jenkins and Jira, and many internal technologies and systems, and dealing with a lot of random left field issues throughout this role.• This also involved supporting the new teams in dealing with a plethora of global technology initiatives that were simultaneously taking place, necessitating change to many of the systems, enabling the business to address various technology risks.• Simultaneously I operated as a management conduit of information, translating between domains and working as a familiar point of contact to various parts of the business, bringing overarching and often deep familiarity with the systems and groups involved.• At the end of my role I presented a series of knowledge-sharing sessions via MS-Teams.

Role summary:• High-level exploration and estimation of upcoming software projects (typically of a 3-12 team-month size) for business planning.• Delivery to the business of more than 200 project estimations and work-breakdowns over a 3-year period, across the company’s entire UK legal content estate, meeting the needs of all stakeholders.• In a managerial capacity, working with stakeholders across the business (involving a lot of communication), shielding development teams from excessive distraction.• The role also included some departmental R&D work such as exploration of Big Data using Hadoop and xml Linked Data on the web.

Sweet & Maxwell was a major and market-leading London-based legal publishing company with a 200-year heritage and continues to exist as a brand within Thomson Reuters. As well as a range of esteemed flagship book products, the company also delivered the market-leading Westlaw UK online legal service (now a Thomson Reuters product).Role summary:• Leading small development teams, sometimes with offshore team members, mostly on Westlaw UK's content publishing systems. Later, this tended to be in an increasingly managerial capacity, working with various stakeholders, involving a lot of communication, and clearing the way for developers to develop unhindered.• Hands-on in-house software development on a succession of projects, mostly on back-end / server-side systems with xml and other content, including development in java, python, bash, SQL (Oracle and MySQL), and applying Test Driven Development (TDD) within a DSDM-based methodology.• Amongst many others, a notable success was the rescue of another team’s failing project. The project’s purpose had been to build an editorial tool for working with a complex taxonomy for UK legislative texts. Its original team had introduced a new software architecture and some major new technologies, and these had run into difficulties and had become toxic. After parachuting into the project and securing it a 3-month extension, my achievement was to work pragmatically with a subset of the original team to successfully complete and deliver the project.• Another notable project was a complex data migration, successfully completed over a 2-year period with a 4–8-person team. This involved merging content from two market leading products to result in a single unified source.• Java 1.2 certification (passed, 89%), Open University refresher module on software systems and their development including concurrent systems (confidently passed, no grading given), and an additional GCSE, in Law (passed, grade A).

Legal Information Resources was a small legal publishing company that had recently been acquired by Sweet and Maxwell in London, itself a part of Thomson that would later become Thomson Reuters.Role summary:• Development of legal publishing and editorial systems that contributed to the launch of the flagship Westlaw UK product. These were internal and back-end systems built using Delphi, Oracle, and C amongst others, integrating an assortment of legacy technologies.• Design and implementation of an Oracle relational database replacing an assortment of legacy desktop datasets holding a slice of mission-critical content.

Crowder & Co (now known as Crowder Consulting, and previously George Crowder Associates) provides consultancy and professional fieldwork services to the global water industry and developed the Netbase software that is now widely used by that industry. In 1985 the company was a small startup employing fewer than 10 people; by 1998 it employed nearer 50 people at multiple sites. The company has since continued to grow.Role summary:• Reporting directly to the managing director throughout the employment.• Day-to-day leadership of a small software development team, working on the redevelopment of the company’s flagship Netbase software as a Windows product.• The hands-on creation of software modules within Netbase, including a new version of the Netbase Geographic mapping module that would overlay water supply networks on Ordnance Survey maps, with full database connectivity. The development was primarily in Borland Delphi, Oracle, and MapInfo.• Co-delivering regular presentations and software demos to the company’s clients, with extensive preparation work, and co-delivery of training courses, and delivering on-site installations of the software for clients.• Inhouse IT support.

Role summary:• Continuing to work with George Crowder Associates, this was a secondment to University of Liverpool for 2 years as part of a local business / education partnership.• Proof of concept and development of the pre-Windows version of the Netbase Geographic mapping module, to create maps of water supply networks with database-connected components, using the MicroStation CAD platform with development in MDL (a specialised implementation of the C programming language).

Role summary:• Reporting directly to the managing director throughout the employment. • The hands-on co-creation of core software modules of the company’s flagship Netbase software, with development in CA-Clipper around a DBF database system on an MS-DOS platform.• Team leading responsibilities for a team of up to 4 developers• Co-delivering regular presentations and software demos to the company’s clients, usually alongside the company’s managing director.Note: The company later changed its name to Crowder Consulting.

Development of an in-house support-call handling system, as a student project, using VAX Pascal, Vax Rdb [now Oracle Rdb], DECforms and DATATRIEVE. This also included writing 200-page functional and design specifications and other waterfall-style documentation using standard templates, and a structured handover to the following year’s students.

Pre-graduation work as a computer programmer, during school/college holidays. Development of a stock control system written in BASIC, and a later version written in Turbo Pascal, using plain files for storage of custom-written data structures.