Curriculum Vitae
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With over 10 years of native iOS development experience, I am an experienced engineering manager and technical leader. My confidence, organisation, pragmatism, and honesty have been instrumental in delivering multi-platform projects to teams of all sizes across various sectors. I thrive on collaborating with colleagues from different disciplines and am deeply passionate about every aspect of mobile and web application development, from design and architecture to coding, testing, and deployment.
Technical skills
- Swift, Objective-C, SPM, CocoaPods
- SwiftUI, UIKit, Core Data, URLSession, NSOperation, Core Location, UIDocument, Store Kit, Adaptive Layout, Storyboards, XCTest
- Signing, Provisioning, Fastlane, xcodebuild
- OOP, TDD, MVVM, Redux Pattern
- Git, Submodules, Ruby Gems, Bundler
- JavaScript, React Native, Metro, NPM, yarn
- REST, SOAP, XML, JSON, GraphQL
- Xcode, Fork, Postman, Charles, Visual Studio Code, Pixelmator, ChatGPT
- App Store Connect, TestFlight, Google Play Console, Apple Developer Portal
- GitLab, GitHub, GitHub Pages, Heroku, Jekyll, Jira, Confluence, Miro, Lucid
- GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, App Center, Bugfender, RevenueCat, Grafana, Dynatrace
Career Summary
Tech Lead, Jaguar Landrover (via AND Digital) — August 2024 - Present
Jaguar Landrover is launching a new, unified luxury experience app for all their vehicles and brands.
- As a native hands-on iOS developer in the Brand Experience squad, my role was to implement features driven by content from the Adobe Experience Manager CMS. I used SwiftUI, XCTest and Redux.
- In a leadership role, I effectively coordinated many technical workstreams to implement a consistent localisation approach for the diverse markets and languages the application would serve. My leadership created a clear vision and approach, which built confidence in the team and stakeholders.
Tech Lead, LightSpeed Broadband (via AND Digital) — February 2024 - April 2024
LightSpeed Broadband are a challenger ISP.
- AND Digital partnered with Lightspeed Broadband to rebuild their website to improve customer conversion and create a modern web platform for future product development.
- Led the technical discovery phase of this project, defining an approach for building and migrating to a new React website in 3 months whilst laying solid foundations for new features and a mobile app.
Tech Principal, AND Digital — October 2022 - Present
AND Digital is a digital consultancy aiming to close the world’s digital skills gap.
- Promoted to Tech Principal in recognition of my work delighting clients, winning new opportunities, and mentoring developers in engineering and leadership skills for their client work.
- Worked in the Operations team for my business unit, making decisions on resourcing, business development strategy, hiring, promotions, and balancing client needs with employee happiness.
- Collaborated with the Marketing and Client Partnerships teams to develop and win new business, including with Travel Chapter, Carnival Cruises and LightSpeed Broadband.
Tech Lead, My Sky (via AND Digital) — December 2021 - December 2023
Over 6 million users across iOS and Android use the My Sky app. It is the primary way customers manage their Sky products, configure their WiFi Max Routers, and administer their accounts.
- In late 2021, I played a pivotal role in AND Digital’s pitch to Sky for a project to re-platform the My Sky app from Native iOS and Android to React Native, enhancing release speed and software quality.
- Outlined the strategy for re-platforming and decoupling from legacy systems, implementing this with a single squad, then scaling to 7 squads with 60 team members.
- Planned and led the first set of releases of the new app in 2023, ensuring a smooth migration for customers from the old version to the latest, using phased rollouts to monitor and fix issues.
- Collaborated with other Tech Leads at Sky to embed skills in TypeScript React Native development, testing and deployment. This enabled the team to release at least once each sprint cycle reliably.
Tech Lead, AND Digital — September 2021 - October 2022
- Joined AND Digital to refocus my career on engineering rather than people management, specifically focusing on my primary interests of mobile application development and technical leadership.
- By understanding our business development strategy, I implemented an approach to training and hiring the technical skills we needed in native and cross-platform development. I created and ran a 2-day native iOS development course, used to upskill 20 developers in Swift, Xcode, SPM and XCTest.
- Volunteered to run the AND-wide Mobile Community of Practice. I organised monthly talks and fostered an inclusive Slack community of over 100 people to support each other in client work.
Head of Development, 3Squared Ltd — 2018 - September 2021
3Squared builds safety and operations software for Freight and Passenger Rail Operators in the UK.
- Led 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, and NuGet, using them across the product suite in 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-term goals to offer the solution as a product to the broader market.
- 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.
Head of Mobile, 3Squared Ltd — 2015 - 2018
- Led a team of 6 iOS and Android developers, supporting and guiding 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) and defined our best practices 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, first with CocoaPods and then SPM. Used them across all new and old projects and open-sourced as The Peak Framework on GitHub.
- Provided technical leadership and iOS development on projects with tight timelines and challenging clients. I also updated clients and worked with Project Management to update company directors on 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 and 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.
Senior iOS Developer, 3Squared Ltd — 2012 - 2015
- Trained the team in XCTest and TDD, as well as best practise for Git and branching with Git Flow.
- Estimated, designed and built multiple native iOS apps in the RailSmart Suite.
- Specialised in data synchronisation performance, identifying the 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.
Personal projects
- Founded a monthly meetup in September 2023 to provide a space for people to share ideas and experiences of creating mobile apps. Since then, we’ve had over 20 unique speakers on many different topics, hosting events at more than eight different venues in Leeds.
- I am really proud of the Leeds Mobile community. Up to 50 people regularly attend each event, there are 120 users in our Slack workspace, and our Meetup page has over 570 members.
- Organised, promoted, and ran each event since launch, recording and editing over 10 talks for the event’s YouTube page.
- Approached businesses and secured sponsorship funding to support the running of the event.
- Topics: Technical Leadership, Mobile Development Approaches, Git Best Practise, History of the Smartphone, Careers in STEM
- Events: DevTalks Romania 2023, iOSDevUK 2022, Leeds Mobile, NSManchester, dotnetsheff
- STEM: University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University, Forge Valley School Sheffield, Leeds City Academy, Bishop Young Academy Leeds, Glossopdale School
- I have also attended: Swift Summit, Úll, UIKonf, ADDC DDD North, iOSCon, SwiftLeeds.
- Developed in 2021, users can build, configure and visualise pivot tables like Microsoft Excel.
- Used TDD to build a Swift algorithm to parse a CSV file into a pivot table. Open-sourced as PeakPivot.
- Used UIDocumentBrowser to load CSV files, and save custom “.pivot” files. Integrates with RevenueCat for receipt validation of in-app purchases. Used Charts library for bar and pie charts.
Education
University of Sheffield 2008-2012 - First Class Masters Degree (with honours) in Software Engineering