John Mcloughlin Email & Phone Number

London, Gb

Skyverse is a startup created by myself and some others during the pandemic. The initial idea was to create an “app” that could be deployed to Pilots’ electronic devices (e.g. iPads) so that they could communicate with Air Traffic Controllers more efficiently. We received good reception at the Airports we demoed the proof of concept at, but they were far more excited about the Air Traffic Control system I’d knocked together. The system was designed to mimic the “strips” used by Air Traffic Controllers as they controlled flights around the Airports ground and Airspace. The business then pivoted into full time development of the strips system, and shelved the Pilot app.My role was predominantly looking after all the technical responsibilities of the company. Initially I was the sole developer and architect of the system, but we soon needed to expand and I took on the additional roles of line manager and project manager. At the technical teams height, we had 2 Developers, a QA and me.The system I architected was composed of two parts a Xamarin app called “Skypilot” that was to be used by Pilots, and an Angular app that backed onto a RESTful ASP.NET back end called “Skytower”. Skytower was hosted in an Azure WebApp and used a hosted SignalR to stream real time updates to the various subscribed clients. The client for Skytower started off an an Azure Static Website, but this was during the very first preview of the technology and we ran into some issues around it hosting an Angular application so we moved it into Azure WebApps. The backend initially used an Azure Function App as the API, but as the complexity of the application grew I moved it across to a RESTful ASP.NET Web API. The storage for the backend initially used Table storage as the data was quite simple, but as relationships emerged in the data I moved it into a relational database in Azure SQL, and then finally COSMOS DB as I was able to simplify the relationships needed for the data.

Providing software consultancy and bespoke application development

Leeds, West Yorkshire, Gb

A brief contract with PureGym on the Payments team. PureGym had split their website into a series of Micro Sites and Micro Services, using Terraform to deploy updates and new infrastructure. As apart of the Payments team, I was responsible for delivering tickets that included new features, bug fixes, and changes to the infrastructure via Terraform. As the other teams were responsible for other areas of the site, good communication was crucial for effectively communicating up coming breaking changes to the object and services contracts that we relied on and our consumers relied on.

London, Gb

Aareon has a legacy system based around .NET Framework and SOAP that they wanted to convert into .NET Standard/Core. This system was currently installed on client’s hardware, but they wanted to create a new version that would be able to be hosted either using cloud services and supporting multiple clients, or still as a single customer installation on the client’s hardware.The SOAP API was to be replaced with a RESTful API that backed onto a series of gRPC Services. The conversion also enabled the inclusion of tests, which the previous code couldn’t support. Each service would be hosted as a micro service in a container.I handled the conversion of three Workflow services, which were all based on a proprietary workflow framework which also had to be converted. Each service was responsible for an aspect of administrating the Workflow, there was a general Administration Service, an Editing Service, and an Execution Service. The legacy code didn’t use dependency injection, and relied heavily on static object creation, as well as lots of in-memory state. The underlying logic was not changed, but now everything is injected and testable, and no longer maintains state in memory, which allowed for scaling of the services.I also handled the conversion of the proprietary pub/sub service which was originally going to be replaced with a Redis instance when the system was hosted in Docker, but when the customer decided to have system installable on client’s hardware as Windows Services, I changed the technology to ZeroMQ (NetMQ) and implemented the xsub/xpub pattern using TopShelf as a host. This allowed the same service to be run as a .NET core console application inside of docker, and as a Windows Service when running on client’s hardware.

Fareham, Hants, Gb

Brought on to help the Innovation team prove new ideas before in-depth development begins. I was initially working on a prototype for a Xamarin app that hooked into an Azure Functions API. The idea was to replace the long-winded verbal exchange between the Air Traffic Controller and Pilot when requesting clearance to take off.This contract was cut short due to the COVID-19 restriction on air travel, which forced NATS to reduce its expenditures.

Leeds, West Yorkshire, Gb

I was a Data Warehouse Architect for the Commercial Finance team. The team had requested help from the development team to put together something they could query to generate various business critical reports around membership and sales. The Commercial Finance team had been relying on reports generated by the Exerp (a third-party membership system) but had found them to be unreliable. I decided to use Kimball’s Star Schema for the three facts that were to be produced. The first fact was a Sales fact, which was a straight forward enrichment process, adding in some small business rules to help the business with identification of the type of sales. The second fact was a Membership which tracked a person’s membership over time with PureGym. This was a very complicated fact, as it was generated from an event file, and had to have some very complicated rules about Joiner and Leaver classification applied. The final fact was the Usage fact, which tracked a person’s usage of the gym(s) over time. Azure Data Factory was used to orchestrate the ETL process, with an Azure Data Warehouse serving as the underlying database.My other role at PureGym was to help with the rewrite of their website. PureGym was in the process of moving from a website written and maintained by a third party, to one written by their newly formed Development team that was to be hosted entirely in Azure. The website itself is hosted on an Azure Umbraco installation serving up a mix of static and React.JS Redux based pages. The service layer for the site, and associated APIs, are all Web APIs. The entire site backed on to a third-party membership system called Exerp.

I ran the Southampton DevSouthCoast (previously known as NxtGenUG) with my fellow Co-Ordinator Richard Allen. We met monthly and had speakers presenting on various development technologies, as well as the methodologies and practices of software architecture, design and development that would interested developers.

I run Micro South Coast with my fellow Co-Ordinator Mark Jones. We meet monthly and have practical sessions on various MicroController based hardware, such as Arduino & .NET Gadgeteer hardware. Each month, we have a different challenge that I set that must be solved using the modules/hardware people have brought along.

Bannockburn, Illinois, Us

Stericycle ExpertSolutions contracted me to help them with the rewrite of 3 of their critical business systems. The first project was to analyse and suggest a new scalable architecture to refresh the existing Email Delivery System (EDS). The EDS is used as the backbone for the majority of email communications sent by Stericycle Expert Solutions. The proposed architecture splits the EDS into 2 systems, the first half is user facing, allowing the user to manipulate and compose email templates that can be storing in an email template library. The second half is a new email generation and sending backbone. This system is based in Azure, to allow for scaling up during periods of heavy load, and to take advantage of the cheap storage.The second system is Stericycle’s surveying platform. I was asked to help define the requirements for the rewrite, identifying areas that could be improved or refreshed, as well as identifying shortcomings of the current system and how they could be improved.The final system I was involved with is Stericycle's recall platform. The recall project was similar to the EDS, in that it was a rewrite to one of Stericycle's critical business systems to take advantage of new technologies, as well as, including distribution of recalls via new communication channels. The architecture again championed Azure, and also explained how it could be used in conjunction with an extended version of the architecture proposed for the EDS to handle more communication methods.I introduced Planning Poker to the planning sessions, which helped focus and improve the estimates being given by the team. I also introduced the concept of deployment tickets, that combined all of the work for a release, which helped estimating the deployment time needed. Previous this time had not been tracked in sprints. I also ran a short interactive workshop on the basics of TDD and using mocking frameworks for effective unit testing.

I ran Functional South Coast with my fellow Co-Ordinator Paul McCaskie and Anthony Brown. We meet up every other month for either a speaker session or coding dojo based on one of the many functional languages out there.

Seattle, Wa, Us

I was brought on to help with a project called IDM (Integrate Data Management) in a new start-up like office in Southampton. The project is to create a cloud based data processing solution. The solution is based in Azure, and uses a proprietary CQRS implementation specifically designed for Azure. The frontend is an Anguar.JS implementation and the back end is an ASP.NET Web API service, both are hosted in Azure. I’ve worked the entire stack for various pieces of functionality, including but not limited to the initial REST services for communication to the Angular front end, which interact with propriety Event Store to maintain the data as it is processed. As well as numerous parts of the Angular application that deal with the creation and configuration of the data to be processed. Finally, I wrote the Operations Diagnostics page, which interrogates the logs from the events tore to help diagnose problems encountered in the wild. It came complete with querying for specific events and logs, as well as the ability to jump to sections of the logs relevant to the event being examined.In addition to the main application, I’ve written a service & application that runs on the clients’ site to upload files required for processing by IDM. The On Premise Uploader does several things apart from uploading into an Azure Blob, it will redact or mask fields based on information configured in the main application. This is a high volume applications, so does pretty much everything in parallel.

Us

My 1st project was Business Insights (BI), a banking analysis application. BI is used to give insights on how you bank was performing compared to McKinsey knowledge and best practices, and benchmarked anonymised competitor comparisons. I performed the role of Senior Developer and XAML expert helping with the creation of MVVM based components and queries, whilst learning the bespoke frameworks used by MDL.The 2nd project was Midas for the OHI service McKinsey offers to asses the health of an organisation based on the analysis of a questionnaire that is sent to out to all company members. The OHI team approached MDL to automate their manual Excel and Powerpoint based approach, to reduce the amount of time that consultants spent doing repetitive calculations. As Team Lead I was in charge of a team of developers, as well as to act in a technical expert role for the application by making architectural and development decisions based on interactions with the Solution team. My team was mostly made up of juniors, whom I mentored in good development practices and the proprietary frameworks to become a team that could deliver high quality applications.The 3rd project, Compass, and was to guide an application through penetration testing and deployment that had recently been completed by an outsourced team.The 4th project was called Price Advisor (PA) and is part of the Periscope suite. PA had been a long running project based in the USA that had gotten into trouble. I was given the project to turn around. The team was composed of local and remote workers with no experience of the proprietary frameworks used by MDL. I was able to create a very efficient team that could start addressing the fundamental architectural and coding problems prevalent in the application. I adopted Kanban, allowing us to fix and stabilise individual screens, whilst at the same time learning the domain without having to commit to a sprints worth of work on an unknown code base.

London, Gb

Imparta are currently migrating their existing Windows Workflow Foundation 3.x code base into Windows Workflow Foundation 4. I was brought into create proof of concept examples for various aspects of the new functionality available in Windows Workflow Foundation 4.I also created a substantial and varied library of custom and composite activities that utilized the Web Services provided by Windows SharePoint Services 3 to allow automation of the creation and management of SharePoint Sites, and to fill gaps in the Windows Workflow Foundation, such as creating a configurable Retry Sequence and a conditional parallel repeat.

Tokyo, Jp

I was brought on to the existing project which at the time was using WPF, Castle Windsor, WCF and EF 4. The product as existed then was hugely complicated and didn't work. My initial task was to join the new team taking over and firelight the product into some semblance of working order to meet a delivery deadline for the end of June. Once this deadline was out of the way, I was able scrap that line of product development in favour of a cleaner Prism client architecture, remodeling of the domain model using properly denormalised Entity Framework Entities, introduction of Test Driven Development & Mocking with Telerik JustMock, and cleanup of the WCF services. The move to this cleaner architecture not only allowed the team to develop the product quicker, reducing the overall cost of the project, but also enabled a higher quality of product as a lot of bugs were being caught by undertaking TDD, again reducing the overall cost of the project. I also introduced the Balsamiq UI mockup tool to allow the business analysts to sketch potential screens layouts, this allowed a quick turn around with the customer to see what the tool would potentially look like and get sign off before development was started.In the end I had to take over the EF modeling as the expert that was brought on was found to be lacking in the required skills, up to this point I'd never used EF and had to get up to speed quickly in order to meet the original deadline that had been set for the rewrite. Within a month and a half of joining I was made Tech Lead of the team and primary support for the Solutions Architect. I'm currently getting the Continuous Integration builds in place, project schedule permitting. I've also done a lot of mentoring in OO, TDD, Prism and Scrum for the team and Sony's off-shore contingent, as well as interviewing for places on the new team.

I was brought into provide mentoring and expertise on .NET and more specifically the Windows Workflow Foundation, as well as to write the crucial server side components of the new Sequoia product. My first job was to create the server component called the Orchestration Engine that would be the crux of the whole system. The Orchestration Engine controls all messages coming in and out of the system by starting and resuming various Workflows. The Workflow components were written in such a way that ASM will be able to move to Windows Workflow 4 when they are ready to with minimal effort. I also created additional services to handle the generation of reports and then spooling the reports to configured printers, all via WCF communication.The second job was to create a custom T4 code generator that would dynamically create various editable, flyweight and read only Data Transfer Objects based upon the classes generated by the IdeaBlades DevForce ORM tool which are heavily based on ADO.NET Datasets. The data transfer objects then enabled me to write a minimal WCF service which allows customers to extend the base Sequoia product by writing their own clients into the system.

I created the modular architecture for the BackOffice Suite that will be crucial to the eGamingPlatform generating revenue from its services and providing the content and opportunities needed by the end users. The modular architecture means that new modules can quickly and cost effectively be independently developed without having to modify or rework the entire suite. To prove the architecture to the business I developed and demonstrated a prototype based on the PRISM and Unity Microsoft Patterns and Practices products. The prototype was greatly received and given overwhelming approval. I am now working on the production Design, Coding & Unit Tests of the Back Office Suite.

London, England, Gb

I created the modular client side architecture for the mission-critical technology refresh of ITVs backbone application infrastructure that is used in all aspects of running their business, from programme procurement to broadcasting. The technology refresh is a part of Michael Grades 5 year strategy to improve ITVs internal performance, as currently there are over 120 individual VB6 and 4GL applications which leads to costly overheads maintaining and extending functionality. The modular architecture was chosen to allow the massive ramp up in development teams working on and offshore to produce standard compliant code which can seamlessly be packaged into an automated deployment to the 400+ desktops. I also provided a critical role in successfully transitioning the department to the new architecture, technologies and methodologies introduced by providing hands-on, first line development and architecture guidance to multiple projects simultaneously.

I designed and implemented the new layout design tool for the next generation of digital photography kiosks being developed by Pixology based on the Visual Studio 2005 designer experience. Previously the kiosk screens had to be developed in house by Developers and then deployed to the individual kiosks which led to very large overheads in terms of development costs and delivery time. The new layout tool enabled anyone to design a new screen and/or re-style an existing layout and deploy it to any number of kiosks across the country via a scheduled remote update, drastically reducing the delivery and production costs. The layout tool further reduced production costs by providing a library of layout templates and styles, as well as previously created layouts that could be utilised to create new layouts.

Southampton, Hampshire, Gb

I provided .NET and C# experience and expertise to the M Cashback project by redesigning the critical Mobile Phone Top-ups and Rewards Code Distribution Server, used to distribute purchased codes to end users, to use a pluggable architecture. This fundamental change to the server allowed for targeted code changes at a fast pace to effectively deliver new code sources (3rd Parties such as Sky) and destinations to be used in the server to extend its functional scope. I also provided a critical role in providing technical mentoring and guidance to the offshore teams in Thailand and Philippines.

The VDS was a ground breaking undertaking to develop a comprehensive IDE that covered the entire software Development Lifecycle and provided all of the tools and logic to enable completion on time and under budget. I lead development and design in several key areas including Audit, Notification, Tool Usage, Source Control and Configuration Management which were all delivered on time and exceed business value expectations. During the development of these areas I also undertook the mentoring and guidance of graduates into the company. I was also key in replacing the bespoke workflow solution created by the company that was proving to be costly in not only maintenance, but in developer time to learn the technology with the Windows Workflow Foundation which drastically cut development time when introduced.

The eCAP system is an online approval system that is used across the media industry to book advertising time on television stations.• Assessing the current testing and release procedures• Design and implementation of improved testing and release procedures• Managing the testing and release of Optimad software• Definition of test planes from specifications and prototypes with the media and development teams• Setup and maintain automated functionality and performance testing, through us of the Astra QuickTest test tool• Customer facing front line technical support

EMPAR is the RADAR to be deployed on the new frigates for the French and Italian Navies. The main component being created was a reusable Signal Processing Unit (SPU).• Creation of the Software Test Procedures used to integrate new modules of software with existing software and/or hardware• Running the Software Test Procedures• Writing synthesised RADAR data to be fed into the SPU for testing• Identifying and resolving any errors discovered during Integration testing• Producing formal runs of the Software Test Procedures for the customer• Initial design of the jammer detection functionality for the SPU

My responsibilities were to provide a range of software engineering skills and support to contracted customers for use on their projects, while based on the customer sites.CSMU UpgradeThe purpose of the project was to upgrade the existing Black Box for the Euro Fighter to handle the new increased memory capacity from 6MB to 128MB. The work involved the embedded software being completelt redesigned.Foxhunter SIFFThe purpose of the project was to make the existing Foxhunter Radar Operational Flight Program more maintainable & supportable. This was achieved by redesigning the software, coding in Ada95 and re-hosting the software onto a PowerPc processor.Brimestone* The design, implementation and administration of the ClearDDTS Change Request tool.* The design, implementation and administration of an Assets database.* Software System Integration Testing on the Ground Firing Trials Seeker Test Set* Seeker Software Testbed project team member

Bsc (Hons), Computing

Btec Higher National Diploma, Software Engineering