I’m a Toronto based software development consultant with over 10 years commercial experience and many more as a hobby. I started out learning to develop basic websites in 2006 and have been hooked ever since. My career roots were humble in PHP, I was building web applications for a design agency while brushing up on my HTML/CSS skills mixed in with a bit of jQuery (or was it mootools back then?).

I have since moved on and somewhere along the way ended up in the Microsoft world for a few years. It was certainly a paragdigm shift but really opened me up to better languages (C#) and frameworks as a whole, and as my programming skills advanced I began to work on more complex applications within highly-skilled agile teams in mainly enterprise settings.

Cloud is certainly a big part of my day, and as of writing I’ve done a shed-load of production Docker/Kubernetes, FaaS and IaC. One could say it’s jumping the gun especially in an enterprise setting where many execs may just be opening up to allowing public cloud – I mean who doesn’t like waiting a month for a server to be provisioned?

I’m not sure this is a fair summary as there have been loads of other things in between – including a few stints at leading teams and really getting stuck into designing and architecting solutions with the whole business.

I enjoy working on exciting projects and consulting/contracting enables me to pick and choose what I want to work on, this keeps me happy and highly motivated. I enjoy meeting new people and hopefully creating lasting business relationships with my clients and colleagues.

Some stuff I’ve helped build

• Bespoke e-commerce platforms, publishing platforms and CMS
• Mobile application backends
• Search-based betting web application
• In-house bookmaker’s website, both front and back-end
• Scraping and data mining
• Financial systems
• Sport result predictions using multiple data sources (scraping and API’s)
• High traffic optimisation and scaling
• Microservice/Macroservice architectures
• Integrations with various enterprise systems and gateways

Some specific technologies

• Angular.js apps from 1.0
• Docker/Microservices
• CQRS/ES
• Messaging, pipelines
• React/Redux
• Cloud native
• Typescript + Node.js
• Observability (Three pillars: mertics, logs, traces)
• Go(lang)
• Elasticsearch
• Cassandra
• Much, much more