Wanting to be a bit more hands-on with technology and the new challenge of teamwork in a remote environment, I joined this small startup. It quickly became obvious that the infrastructure required an overhaul, so I set about automating everything with Ansible and Terraform, introducing the concept of declarative infrastructure-as-code, and improved security by use of VPCs and load balancers and installation of a VPN. I have also introduced microservices, using them to build out the publicly-available API, and am in the process of moving our services over to Kubernetes. Where it makes sense, these services are built in an event-sourced manner.

HelloFresh experienced explosive growth in the tech department, and as we approached Dunbar's Number in late 2016 it became obvious that the current organisational hierarchy would not scale. A re-org was in order, and as part of it I was asked to step up to become a head of department (or Tribe, in Spotify Model nomenclature).Directors of Engineering in HelloFresh perform something of a dual role, both leading and mentoring teams of engineers as well as providing the overall technical strategy. For almost a year, I moved between multiple departments to help specific projects along (including launching in Luxembourg, France, and New Zealand, as well as implementing our Kubernetes solution), and in January 2018 was given the opportunity to build a new department from scratch. Pivoting from engineer to manager has been an intensely challenging, but highly rewarding, experience.Today, I work closely with my teams of hand-picked engineers both as a mentor, as well as in my capacity as their manager. I hold 1:1s, facilitate performance reviews and 360 feedback rounds, run Agile ceremonies, set OKRs, and so on. I'm also responsible for technical architecture and guidance, and work with my Product Managers to build the overall product strategy and roadmap. The reward of seeing my teams consistently deliver on time, in full, and against the odds, as watching these individuals as grow as engineers and mentors themselves, is unsurpassed.

The nature of my work as a freelancer and in a small agency over the past few years wasn't conducive to professional development - it's tough to learn as the most senior developer in the room. Pursuing other goals led me to Berlin, where I joined the then-fledgling tech team at HelloFresh.I was assigned to the Supply Chain Management team, doing greenfield development of a new system for Procurement. We built this using the tenets of Domain-Driven Design and TDD, as a Symfony application with an Angular.js front-end. The project launched successfully, firstly for the US market before being rolled out to other countries. Due to the modular nature of the application, a couple of microservices were also split out of the app, to allow for increased flexibility in terms of scaling as well as to address specific needs of particular countries. These were Go APIs and RabbitMQ consumers, written with an in-house (but open-source) Golang Event Sourcing library called Engine.After around 6 months I was approached by the head of department and asked to become the Backend Chapter Lead. This is a role analogous to an architect at other companies, responsible for promotion of best practices, standardising methods across teams, and fostering a continuous learning environment and sharing culture across all backend developers.

I put together a number of websites on the side, mainly for charitable causes that would have had difficulty paying an agency's fees.

I was hired as the sole fullstack developer for this agency, as I had skills complimentary to the design skills that the company already had.I moved the company to a more streamlined workflow using git for versioning and deployment, and brought in some elements from Lean / Scrum / Kanban.Since then, the company has evolved into a technical / design consultancy firm, solving problems for businesses with thoughtful application of design and effective technical solutions. From my technical perspective, this was solutions architecture, using tools such as Perch CMS, Laravel, or Node.js & Express.On the front-end side, I worked with several JS frameworks (in particular Angular.js and Knockout.js), and gained valuable knowledge of and skills in design and branding techniques and processes.Main skills:- Solutions Architecture- Laravel & CodeIgniter- Node.js & Express- Perch & ExpressionEngine CMS's- Angular.js

My job was to support the Logistics department with internal tool development and maintenance in ASP.NET and C#, as well as a lot of database work (SQL Server), performing administration and creating queries for BI on our SAP data lake (using MS BIDS and Teradata). I worked closely with customers on many projects of various sizes, and several dashboards using SQL Server Reporting Services. Teamwork was managed with the Scrum methodology, and TFS was used for version control. I also dealt with support requests, worked on servers (using Remote Desktop and IIS) and worked on mobile UIs with Silverlight.Skills acquired:- C# & .NET- Silverlight- SSRS & SSIS / BIDS- MS SQL Server & Teradata EDW- Scrum- SVN & TFS

System C Healthcare is a software company developing software for the NHS. During the summers of 2008 and 2009 I worked on the support desk for some of their products. The job entailed answering and logging support calls from the staffs of various hospitals across the country. I also helped design a HTML manual and wrote some SQL queries to help solve the reported problems, and developed a PHP/MySQL customer database web application to help the support team.Skills acquired:- MS SQL Server- SSIS- Customer liaising