Curriculum Vitae
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An adept engineering manager with 9 years commercial iOS development experience. I am a confident, organised, pragmatic and honest leader, with a proven record of delivering multi-platform projects to private and public sector organisations. I enjoy collaborating with colleagues across disciplines, and I am passionate about designing, architecting, coding, testing and deploying mobile and web applications.
Technical Skills
- Objective-C, Swift, Ruby
- UIKit, Core Data, Networking, NSOperation, Core Location, UIDocument, Store Kit, Map Kit, Adaptive Layout, Storyboards, XCTest
- Signing, Provisioning, Fastlane, xcodebuild
- Object & Protocol Oriented Development, Test Driven Development
- Swift Package Manager, CocoaPods, Git Submodules, Ruby Gems, Bundler
- REST, SOAP, XML, JSON, Message Queues, Apple Push Notifications
- Xcode, Fork, SourceTree, Postman, Charles, Visual Studio Code, Pixelmator
- App Store Connect, TestFlight, Apple Developer Portal, Apple Business Manager
- GitLab, GitHub, GitHub Pages, Heroku, Azure Functions, Jekyll, Jira
- App Center, Bugfender, RevenueCat
Career Summary
2018: Head of Development at 3Squared.
3Squared builds safety and operations software for Freight and Passenger Rail Operators in the UK.
- Lead a team of 25 developers (Native iOS, Native Android, ASP.NET, Vue.js) to build the RailSmart software suite. Implemented a cohesive and inclusive team vision and management approach.
- Recruited at multiple levels (Graduates to Senior Engineers), growing the team by 50% during the first year of my leadership. Implemented a graduate scheme to train and mentor junior developers.
- Designed and embedded a technical strategy to move to SaaS, focusing on simpler, consistent tech stacks and approaches, across different platforms and 20+ codebases. Standardised reusable packages with SPM, NPM, NuGet, using them across the product suite in both new and old projects.
- Planned and managed technology transitions including CocoaPods to Swift Package Manager, ASP.NET Web Forms to Vue.js, Octopus Deploy to Azure DevOps, and on-prem GitLab to GitHub.
- Mentored developers new to leadership, allowing me to manage the larger team through them.
- Managed team resourcing, identifying developers with the right technical and soft skills for projects.
- Defined the web API architecture to integrate with systems at Network Rail. Worked with internal and external technical teams to implement a phased approach to integration with our applications, with longer terms goals to offer the solution as a product to the wider market.
- Planned the transition to Federated Identity for our SaaS products. Identified the complexities across our platforms, aligning them with infrastructure, testing, UX, and cost considerations.
- Regularly a part of sales activity, working on bid and tender documentation to win big contracts with Network Rail and HS2. Defined technical approach to delivering software in multi-year iterations.
- Managed a quick transition into remote work in March 2020. Adapted my communication approach and the team structure to better suit remote work, supporting individual team members personally.
2015: Head of Mobile at 3Squared.
- Lead a team of 6 iOS and Android developers, supporting and guiding both their technical and professional development through 1-2-1s, goal setting and appraisals.
- Planned and managed the transition from Objective-C to Swift (starting at version 2.2). Defined our best practise for migration and interoperability. All new projects used 100% Swift after 2017, and older, larger Objective-C codebases were gradually re-written; now 75% in Swift by 2021.
- Standardised iOS components into small, reusable packages using CocoaPods. Used them across all new and old projects, and open sourced as The Peak Framework on GitHub.
- Technical leadership and iOS development on projects with tight timelines and challenging clients. I organised the team to work concurrently. I gave updates to clients and worked with Project Management to update company directors on our progress.
- Worked as part of the Operational Management Team to implement new policies such as Agile rituals, standardised appraisal approaches, and inclusive recruitment principles.
- Responsible for managing the company’s App Store Connect and Enterprise Developer Accounts, as well as supporting the setup and admin of customers’ Apple accounts and MDMs.
- Reduced errors and saved time by automating builds. Used Ruby and xcodebuild to standardise app versioning and signing. Released for QA and production (App Store) using Team City on a Git push.
2014: Senior iOS Software Engineer at 3Squared.
- Mentored mobile developers, designed induction projects and trained them in our best practices.
- Trained the team in XCTest and TDD, and best practise for Git and branching with Git Flow.
- Estimated, designed and built multiple native iOS app in the RailSmart Suite. Specialised in data synchronisation performance, identifying best approaches for Core Data, threading, web API calls and JSON serialisation.
- Completed a research project for Crossrail. Used iBeacons, Core Location, and trilateration to determine user position. Ran trials at the Bond Street site and wrote a recommendations report.
2012: iOS Software Engineer at 3Squared.
- Developed iOS apps for a number of clients in Health Insurance, Hospitality, Constriction and Rail Freight.
- Used Objective-C, Core Data, Storyboards, and integrated with RESTful and SOAP XML APIs.
Personal Projects
2021: Pivot for iOS.
- After being unable to find an app to build Excel-style pivot tables I decided to build one myself.
- Used TDD to build a Swift algorithm to parse a CSV file into a pivot table. Open sourced as PeakPivot. Integrated into the app using the Swift Package Manager.
- Used UIDocumentBrowser to load CSV files and save custom “.pivot” files back to file providers.
- Used RevenueCat for server side receipt validation, implementing a one time in-app-purchase unlocking all features after a 7 day free trial.
- Built as a universal app, supporting all size classes, and dark and light mode.
- Created an app landing webpage, and TestFlight sign up form using the FastLane Boarding Ruby Gem hosted on Heroku.
2015 Onwards - Public Speaking
- Debugging with Git - DDDNorth 2019, dotnetsheff 2019, UIKonf 2020 (in remote breakout room)
- The Peak Framework - NSManchester 2019, SwiftYork 2019
- Get Good with Git - The University of Sheffield Institute of Coding talks 2019 & 2020, Sheffield Hallam University since 2016 to computing students
- A Swift Journey - NSManchester 2017
- Error Handling In Swift 2.0 - SheffieldSwift July 2015
2014: Transported for iPhone.
- Provided live public transport departure times in South and West Yorkshire.
- Local database of transport nodes (NaPTAN) from gov.uk, seeded into Core Data
- Scraped departure board HTML data. Opensourced the parser as LJSYourNextBus.
- Open sourced codebase after finishing active development.
- 7000 downloads since launch.
Publications
This paper describes the University of Sheffield’s submission to SemEval-2012 Task 6: Semantic Text Similarity. Two approaches were developed. The first is an unsupervised technique based on the widely used vector space model and information from WordNet. The second method relies on supervised machine learning and represents each sentence as a set of n-grams. This approach also makes use of information from WordNet. Results from the formal evaluation show that both approaches are useful for determining the similarity in meaning between pairs of sentences with the best performance being obtained by the supervised approach. Incorporating information from WordNet also improves performance for both approaches.
Bird watching has long been a passion of millions of people around Great Britain. The traditional combination of bird reference book, notebook and pencil are a tried and tested method of gathering accurate bird sighting information. With the invention of mobile computer technology, specifically in the field of smartphones, the opportunity for bringing bird watching into the modern age has never been greater. The project aims to bridge the analogue and digital mediums by conceptualising, designing, implementing and then evaluating a mobile software product for identifying and logging bird sightings. The software product should have good usability metrics by following respected usability engineering practises, and also provide a excellent bird information repository comparable to that of a conventional bird reference book.
Education
- 2012: First Class Masters Degree (with honours) in Software Engineering from The University Of Sheffield.
- 2008: 3.5 A-levels in Mathematics, Physics and Applied ICT from Sheffield Hillsborough College.
