Thys Swart Email & Phone Number

London, Gb

London Area, United Kingdom

London Area, United Kingdom

London, United Kingdom

London, United Kingdom

I worked with the Head of Software Development and Research and two Development Managers to plan and execute the incremental delivery across all the E-commerce engineering teams of an Architecture Evolution Strategy. The main business driver was increased performance and stability across the existing E-commerce web applications, whilst allowing the department’s software systems to end up with loosely coupled architecture, designed around core business domains.Achievements:DevOps capabilities focus for all teams (to name a few: little-and-often incremental development, monitoring and alerting, visualising work, you build it - you own it)Line managed and promoted multiple Team Leads and Senior Developers into Development Managers and Specialist roles respectivelyImplemented trunk based development, feature flagging / toggling and continuous delivery across all teams and their pipelines, to help facilitate faster delivery but still focusing on quality through existing test driven development practices and test automation.Introduced second line product support, fulfilled by each developer in all product teams, tobackup existing first line product support fulfilled by all DevOps engineers. Managed the introduction of an Agile Practice Lead role, functioning across all teams to facilitate training in consistency of software design, best practices and on-boarding.Managed introduction of canary releases on application level.

London, United Kingdom

I worked with the E-commerce Systems Architect and 5 Team Lead Developers, with a main focus of day to day development work and process, team recruitment and operational health across the E-commerce Development Department. Over a number of years I managed the modernisation of the Magento E-commerce Web applications of Kurt Geiger (mainly https://www.kurtgeiger.com and https://www.shoeaholics.com), through various projects. To name a few of the major ones: the integration with a new search-and-merchandising tool, the introduction of an internal bespoke CMS solution, a Product Information Management tool, the replacement of the legacy Distribution Center WMS, a bespoke Customer Services Representative solution, a new Email Service Provider and a new online Payment Gateway.At the end of my tenure as Development Manager of the department, we had grown to over 50 people across a range of disciplines, most of them working from the London Head Office.Achievements:Helped introduce and develop a lot of working knowledge of Splunk, used for the department's operational intelligence, focusing on alerting, dashboarding and ad-hoc querying. Helped `democratise` the department's machine data, which facilitated further drivers of success in other departments of the organisation.Introduced Kanban as an Agile Software Methodology, specifically putting onus on the visibility of work, work in process limits and keeping the flow of work granular and constant. Personally developed one of the department’s first AWS APIGateway interfaces + AWS Lambda services, helping introduce the concept of smaller functional services, eventually leading the way to a new modus-operandi in development in later years.Initial introduction of trunk based development, feature flagging and continuous delivery in 2 teams, as means to test continuous improvement and speed of deliveryManaged the introduction of automated feature / acceptance tests into continuous integration build pipelines

London, United Kingdom

Working with the Development Manager and all developers within the E-commerce department, I helped develop and lead most of the work coming into the teams. Two of the major projects worth mentioning, Kurt Geiger’s Click and Collect offering (backed up by a web application accessible to the store colleagues through an iPad - later on evolving into an Endless Aisle solution for stores); and launching further Magento web applications selling products on the two major branded domains in EUR, USD and AUD, with a final total of 21 E-commerce web applications, including the existing GBP websites.Achievements:Helped introduce test driven and behaviour driven development practices across all teams.Managed the further adoption of Scrum in teams, mostly taking up the role of Scrum Master. Assisted Operations team with introduction of continuous integration pipelines, running unit test automation

London, England, United Kingdom

I worked with the Development Manager and in various development teams to develop and maintain features on the main E-commerce Web applications of Kurt Geiger, built on Magento. The majority of the work was related to integration with various systems, for instance product information management, as well as order and warehouse management. Achievements:Was a part of the 1st line on-call support structure, assisting the departments’ systems administrators.Part of the team that launched Kurt Geiger’s main website (https://www.kurtgeiger.com) onto Magento Enterprise, also launching another brand a year or so later (https://www.shoeaholics.com) Helped the development team change from using Subversion to Git as source control solutionReceived Scrum Certification as well as Zend Certified Engineer - 5.3

London, United Kingdom

Working with the Head of Information Systems in the IT department, I was responsible for helping manage the development of a project with a 3rd party supplier out of Israel, with the ultimate aim of being responsible for the maintenance of the project once launched.Achievements:The project I initially worked on ultimately became the store stock ordering model, which allowed customers to place orders in store or online, for stock that was physically located in the company’s 60+ stores. Took over ownership of a bespoke Product Information Management system, which was used to provide product data to the company's E-Commerce web application as well as concessions partnersTook over ownership of the company’s intranet site.

Cape Town Area, South Africa

Working with the Managing Director and the Lead Developer, I spent most of my time helping develop websites for the company’s clients, learning about using PHP as a main web development language, as well as assisting with some of the company’s .Net projects.Achievements:Assisted with the development of a project for a major estate agent in South Africa, that also has a global presence.Worked on an implementation mostly on my own for one of the company’s clients, as a main project.Received a provisional offer of permanent employment on finishing my degree.

Bachelor Of Technology (Btech), Information Technology

Education record