Zap Technology (www.zaptechnology.com) is a Business Intelligence (BI) software company based in Queensland, Australia.I am the Quality Engineering Manager. My responsibilities include shipping product and managing the development of automated testing systems.

Yamaha have an online sheet music and tuition service called the Digital Music Notebook (www.digitalmusicnotebook.com). The application consists of a customized Internet Explorer control with an underlying MIDI sequencer. My role involved both the maintenance of existing code and the development of new features. Most notably, I reengineered the multi-threading architecture of the underlying MIDI sequencer to prevent unpredictable crashes. I was also responsible for supporting the installer, managing release notes and releasing builds. My final task was to oversee the development of an automated update system. Yamaha has a very mature development methodology. The team received professional training in the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and was assigned a dedicated project manager with agile development experience. We were expected to identify risk, produce accurate estimations and provide thorough documentation at each stage of the development process, including UML diagrams.

My main role at Black Cactus was the development of a proprietary game creation system called the Game Set. Much more than a scripting language for character behaviour, it allowed designers to define new object types (characters, buildings, missiles, props etc) and edit all conceivable attributes for these, from animation and sound to interface behaviour (context sensitive cursors etc), in effect, to create a whole new game with the existing engine. The experience of trying to keep an independent software company running was a significant one for me (we eventually grew to 22 people). Above all, it taught me the importance of being realistic when setting goals in software development. I believe it has given me a maturity of outlook that I would not have developed had I always worked for large companies.