At Spruce^ki we love finding elegant solutions to complex problems. My current focus here is on the fast changing telecommunications space where we are introducing the next generation of our telco network and billing platform. My present roles include:- Lead developer / Architect of a brand new, Web/Java EE based telco network and billing platform, involved in all areas from high-level design through implementation, DBA, deployment and operation.- Product and vendor management for our providers of telco services and software, hosted infrastructure, middleware and dev tools.

- Software engineer for a medium-sized telecommunications client.- Responsible for defining their overall information technology strategy, working with 3rd-party developers to ensure that outsourced products are complimentary to this strategy. - Strategy incorporates such things as choice of operating system, virtualisation, middleware and application server. Designed to allow 3rd-party developers maximum flexibility while making integration with existing applications as painless as possible. Aims to solve many difficult operational issues such as maximising scalability and reliability and maintaining uptime during scheduled maintenance.- Develop ad-hoc internal applications to assist with business operations, performing data capture and analysis over large data sets.Toolset Used:- Amazon Web Services- BoxGrinder- CentOS 5 Linux- KVM Virtualisation- TorqueBox 1 (JBoss AS 6)- Hornet Q (JMS and STOMP)- Java- Seam 3- Hibernate / JPA- Ruby on Rails- MySQL

- Requirements gathering and customer feedback analysis- Application design, construction, deployment and maintenance- Functional and non-functional testing and quality assurance

Hired into Detica's Financial services department as Senior Consultant, I was assigned to the Liquidity Hub project to help build an interest rate swaps trading platform using CameronFIX Engine, Java, Spring, Fiorano messaging server and Oracle. On this 40-strong team of business analysts, architects and developers, my first major task was to fully automate the execution and reporting of their Grinder-based performance test suite. Next I joined one of the development sub-teams to work on design and development of the indicative-price calculation component. As the product went into pre-launch I took on the role of second-line support, fielding phone calls from the client's embedded first-line support engineers, collaborating quickly with other developers and SMEs to perform root-cause-analysis and deliver solutions to issues in a calm and timely manner. Next I put my hand up for a role as lead developer of the new dealer portal component, which I designed and developed using JBoss Seam, JSF, Hibernate/JPA and Oracle, which I presented as being the most suitable technology stack given the largely CRUD-based requirements and the aggressive schedule. At this time I was promoted to Principal Consultant.Tools Used:- Java- Spring- CameronFIX Engine- Fiorano Messaging Server- Seam 2- JSF- Hibernate / JPA- Oracle- MavenWhen the GFC struck I transferred into Detica's government department to work with another large team on a highly sensitive distributed enterprise Java system. Again I started as a member of a development team working on a search component, but quickly sought out a more challenging role leading a team of 6 to develop a data-loading system to support performance testing of the entire application under realistic 3-to-5 year data loads. This system had to be highly multithreaded, resilient and efficient in order to achieve this goal.Tools Used:- Java- Oracle- WebLogic- EJB- WorkManager EJB Multithreading API- Maven