Don Smith Email & Phone Number

Tākaka, Tasman, Nz

New Zealand

Helping teams build better software

Auckland, New Zealand

Dev Academy has one main product, a fullstack web development bootcamp course focused on helping people get the skills they need to build great software with other developers. This requires a broad understanding of languages, technologies and processes we use to build software. It also requires self-awareness and how to work well with other humans. Fortunately, Dev Academy applies equal treatment to both of these requirements throughout the bootcamp.When I joined the team, our Wellington campus had been open for about a year. In May of 2016 I opened the Auckland campus. Since then, I've done a lot of teaching, curriculum development, facilitation, mentoring and having fun. Five years (and 27 cohorts) later, we have a full staff and a waitlist for students to join the programme.One of my proudest moments has been when we went into our first COVID lockdown. With only a couple of days of notice, we took the entire in-person bootcamp experience and moved it entirely online without skipping a beat and without sacrificing the student experience. As a result of our success, we soon opened our third campus, the online campus.

Auckland, New Zealand

Altrusium is the business entity I use when doing freelance development. During this time, I built modern web and mobile solutions for global and local organisations in the US and NZ. One of these projects was working with the Google Cloud team to stress test an exemplary full-stack app to ensure Google Cloud has the requisite tools for managing/troubleshooting complex apps. One of my responsibilities was to write the load test scripts (Python/Locust) that identified the weak points of the app. (Unsurprisingly it was database access more often than not.) But I have to admit, this was a pretty fun project. It turns out that watching how an app falls over under load is fun to watch and troubleshoot.Altrusium, an element of Altruism

Auckland, New Zealand

Little Lot enables people to contribute to the local charities they care about, for free. It does this by changing their desktop wallpaper to an image/photograph sponsored by a local company. Little Lot gives 75% of the revenue to the user's chosen charity. My role is to enable this solution to be deployed to all PCs throughout an organisation as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives.To this end, I built a Windows client (WPF) application from scratch that consumes Little Lot's backend API that is enterprise-ready in terms of security and deployment. This involved building all of the user interface and associated services, an automated build environment (using FAKE), a silent automatic installation/updating feature (using Squirrel), and setting up the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) environment for testing (Azure VMs).

Auckland, Nz

Building web, mobile, and Windows 8 concept applications for keynote sessions and training on behalf of various Microsoft product teams (Dynamics, Server and Tools, and the Windows Embedded Business). Solution lead for Internet of Things (IoT) practice.

Redmond, Wa

Product Management and Program Management on the patterns & practices team (http://msdn.com/practices) building developer guidance for .NET developers in the form of Open Source code and books. Leadership team member that managed community interactions, ran annual conference, spoke at local and international symposiums, and managed projects on web and mobile technologies.

Charlotte, Nc

Liaised between customers and Microsoft product teams. Built and delivered customer training on .NET 2.0, XML (XSLT, XSD, etc), and Web Services (ASMX, WSDL, etc). Delivered custom workshops to large and small customers all over the US.

Dayton, Ohio Area

Building internal and external web sites and applications for the regional medical center and its departments. Training healthcare professionals on using the web for research. Building solutions that integrated with Bioinformatic systems. Helped deploy electronic patient record system.

Soesterberg, Nl And Dayton, Oh

Repairing, calibrating, and provisioning medical and dental equipment in both outpatient clinics and departments in the regional medical center. Specialized in surgical and opthalmic lasers.