Philip Stears Email & Phone Number

Thelwall, Cheshire, Gb

DriveWorks is very close to my heart and I’m excited to be back ‘to my roots’. Having worked on the codebase at DriveWorks for a number of years, and on a number of versions, it makes me really proud to see how the software and the team have evolved as technologies and market needs have changed.As CTO, my role at DriveWorks is to keep my finger on the pulse of the technology world at large, the industry and what our customers want, to identify trends and ensure we have the technical underpinnings necessary to address them and continue to drive our software forward.

London, London, Gb

This role has involved working closely with prospects and customers, and sometimes other vendors, to gather requirements for, and design and deliver complex media solutions, which typically have elements that are distributed and fault tolerant in nature, including:The design and Implementation of various high-performance components for a greenfield media product in Rust, including, Transport Stream demuxing, H.264 video codec parsing, and WebRTC ingest.Involved in Design and Implementation of world-wide WebRTC CDN capability for a major CDN, comprising an orchestration layer built using PureErl (a PureScript language binding to Erlang), and an accelerated WebRTC delivery layer using the Rust. A hybrid Nix build system was used, with a final step to make the Nix-built assets useable on non-Nix systems. This was a highly complex system involving engineers at the CDN, and id3as to work closely with one another to deliver a scalable system.Introduced Nix (a functional, reproducible, build system and package manager) to solve complex build dependency management issues across the development platforms in use at id3as (various Linux distributions, and macOS).The design and implementation of a fault-tolerant system to receive calls from SIP-enabled Video Conferencing Units. Implemented SIP/SIPS, RTP, and SRTP using Erlang on the back-end, and Elm on the front-end.The design and Implementation of a redundant, fault tolerant, webcasting platform on Amazon’s AWS using Erlang on the back-end and React on the back-end.The design and implementation of a container cluster orchestration platform using an implementation of the Raft distributed consensus protocol, after reviewing several distributed consensus protocols, and performing white box evaluation of implementations.

Thelwall, Cheshire, Gb

Strong contributor to the codebase, which comprised a combination of Visual Basic.NET and C#.Introduction of systems and procedures to support the creation of world-class software, including, source control, automated builds, symbol serving, performance and memory profiling, memory dump analysis, crash reporting, installer builds, code signing, API and end-user documentation management, automated testing, coding standards for style, performance, and globalization, and release management.Heavy involvement at public facing events such as SolidWorks World and our conference, DriveWorks World. Joint keynote demo of the next major version with the CEO at DriveWorks Worlds, as well as API training, and relationship building. Managed the IT infrastructure required for events.Built and strengthened relationships with customers, resellers, partners and SolidWorks.Building and managing the development team, including recruitment of full-time employees and placement students, (including working closely with universities to support them), onboarding training for new developers, ongoing training (including peer-to-peer, encouraging participation in user groups, encouraged keeping abreast of developments in technical trends, and performance management).Implementation of Kanban and stand-ups as the team scaled past its first few developers, to improve communication and engagement. Extended an invitation to the stand-ups to the technical team leader to help build engagement between the technical team and the development team.Heavily involved in increasing performance and strengthening the foundation to provide a step-change in capabilities for customers including a vastly improved web experience, and the ability to customize the workflow of the product to map directly on to customers’ processes.Led the development of DriveWorks’ 3D capabilities so we could better meet the needs of the sales configuration market on desktop, web, iOS, and Android.

Thelwall, Cheshire, Gb

I joined DriveWorks as one of the first few employees.Worked with DriveWorks CEO and Co-Founder to improve the capability of the DriveWorks product. Built DriveWorks major versions using Visual Basic.Design, deployment, and management of infrastructure to support the needs of the business, both on-site, and as co-located infrastructure in a data centre, including, Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, VoIP, inter-site and end-user VPNs, Dynamics CRM, product licensing, and a dedicated synchronous fibre connection to the Internet.