Michael Townshend Email & Phone Number

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

As Software Engineer Manager I have responsibility for the overall management of the software engineering team. I continue to employ the skills I used as the Lead Engineer but with greater oveall responsibility. The number of people I am directly responsible for has increased as has my role in oversight, coaching, mentorship and career progression for those people. As well as the tactical skills I used as Lead Engineer I have extended my strategic role in working with the business as a… Show more As Software Engineer Manager I have responsibility for the overall management of the software engineering team. I continue to employ the skills I used as the Lead Engineer but with greater oveall responsibility. The number of people I am directly responsible for has increased as has my role in oversight, coaching, mentorship and career progression for those people. As well as the tactical skills I used as Lead Engineer I have extended my strategic role in working with the business as a whole to prioritise upcoming work, plan for the future, manage technical debt and set the overall agenda for software development. A key part of this is communicating transparently and frequently with the business on the way planned and unplanned changes affect our goals and our commitments around them.I am a key driver of the culture within the team, encouraging developers to own all of our code whether we wrote it or not, and through improved code reviews and pair programming creating a commitment to improve code wherever we interact with it. Show less

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

As Lead Software Engineer I have responsibility for overseeing and building the overall architecture and direction of development for the company. I have had a leading role in the development of the team through the employment process and mentorship. RSAWEB has been an excellent environment to express and develop some key skills; my analytical thinking around microservice architecture, interfaces, adapters and other design patterns has helped to develop a robust and sustainable system. My… Show more As Lead Software Engineer I have responsibility for overseeing and building the overall architecture and direction of development for the company. I have had a leading role in the development of the team through the employment process and mentorship. RSAWEB has been an excellent environment to express and develop some key skills; my analytical thinking around microservice architecture, interfaces, adapters and other design patterns has helped to develop a robust and sustainable system. My architectural and systems thinking has lead to better work practices, more traceable code and better task management; as well as more reliable code deployments, better testing and greater adherence to SOLID design principles.I am a key communicator within and for the team, creating good working relationships with the wider business. Through improved communications and better processes I have helped improve the quality of feature requests and the scoping of work as well as improved relationships through better management of expectations.Notable recent successes have been managing and building a new online shop on a mixtureof platforms including Wordpress and WooCommerce with bespoke plugins as well as Django and PHP microservices and APIs and integration with several third-party providers. I was also responsible for designing and building a data distributor system that receives information from any of several systems and decides where else in the ecosystem that data belongs and copies it there. The distributor keeps track of all the events, and the state of the data with a bespoke queues that avoids clashing updates and has the ability to replay events if required. This system has become central to the entire business process and is designed in such a way as to allow easy extensibility with new systems as needed.In my first year I was given the company’s Innovation and Creativity Award, and the second year I was voted Employee of the Year. Show less

Amersham, England, United Kingdom

Highwire was set up with my business partner Rick Osman with the intent of developing an online tool for hotel chains to manage their construction and design standards. Together we built Hotel-Standards, an award-winning information management tool (most recently we won both Best In Hotel & Hospitality Refurbishment and Best In Hotel Design/Build Management Software at the 2018 BUILD Awards). Hotel-Standards is, or has been, used by Hilton International, Accor, Whitbread, Scandic, Louvre… Show more Highwire was set up with my business partner Rick Osman with the intent of developing an online tool for hotel chains to manage their construction and design standards. Together we built Hotel-Standards, an award-winning information management tool (most recently we won both Best In Hotel & Hospitality Refurbishment and Best In Hotel Design/Build Management Software at the 2018 BUILD Awards). Hotel-Standards is, or has been, used by Hilton International, Accor, Whitbread, Scandic, Louvre Hoteles and Grupo Posadas.Highwire also built websites and web applications for a diverse range of clients from relatively simple bespoke WordPress themes to advanced document editing tools such as Docular, the most advanced legal document generator on the internet. My intention was never to be the lead programmer for Highwire but I found I was able to produce better code faster than the programmers we employed andso programming became a bigger and bigger part of my role. I have undergone a process of continuing professional development and I have been responsible for designing front-end UI and improving usability as well as and so have a holistic grasp of the entire project process. I have kept myself up-to-date with relevant skills and not only understand the current important technologies but have an understanding of emerging technologies too. Show less