Overview⌗

I have over 25 years of experience in the IT and software industries, working across a variety of organisation types, sizes, and sectors from tiny ISPs and consulting businesses to telecomms, finance, and academia. Initially a systems administrator with some coding ability, over the years I’ve transitioned into leadership roles.

Honesty, integrity, and maintaing an inclusive culture are very important to me.

What I’m looking for⌗

Not actively seeking a new role right now, but open to opportunties for my next career move. This might include things like:

  • a more senior role in a larger infrastructure team, e.g., head of infra
  • a more senior role in a smaller engineering team, e.g., head of engineering
  • perhaps a similar role but in a more general software engineering team
  • or if you’ve got the dollarydoos and want to build a kick-ass accessibility testing toolkit, I’d absolutely be up for that

Skills⌗

  • Team leadership and building
  • Strong written and verbal communications, including explaining technical concepts and tradeoffs to folks with other backgrounds and negotiating with stakeholders and suppliers
  • Business case development
  • Programming: primarily back-end in Python and Perl, with some Ruby on Rails and PHP. Basic Javascript. HTML and CSS.
  • Database design and implementation: mainly with MySQL and derivatives of late, but also Sybase and some PostgreSQL. Experience as a DBA.
  • Web accessibility, testing and remediation
  • Infrastructure architecture design, implementation, and maintenance
  • Certified SCRUM Master

Employment History⌗

Marketplacer, Engineering Manager⌗

February 2022 to present

Engineering Manager responsible initially for operations, data science, and design systems teams. After a restructure responsible for Platform Excellence and Customer Health value streams. Because of my extensive experience in infrastructure and operations work I’ve taken both a people- and technical-leadership role for my teams.

Key accomplisments:⌗

  • excellent feedback from my managers, peers, and reports, as well as from other departments (e.g., legal, customer success, security)
  • expanded data team from two people to five, adding data engineers to build and manage the new data platform which was launched on time despite challenges
  • managed my teams through the restructure and out the other end, helping people cope with the uncertainty and ruffled feathers
  • delivering on high profile and very tight deadline major project (still under NDA) in the middle of the re-organisation
  • hiring good people to expand the Platform team
  • establishing an SRE team
  • significant infrastructure cost savings without degrading the platform

Marketplacer, Senior Developer⌗

January 2020 to February 2022

Marketplacer’s first hire as a dedicated infrastructure person. Worked as part of a team of four.

Key points:⌗

  • Involved in working groups across the product and engineering teams, including IAM, data and privacy, legal compliance, and identifying customer and customer success pain points
  • Aided in migration of platform from “special snowflake” hosts to an autoscaling containerised infrastructure using AWS ECS
  • Migrated from AWS RDS MySQL to Aurora for core database platform,
  • Migrated from in-house unmananaged and unmaintained Elasticsearch to maanged Elastic Cloud, including application changes required by Elasticsearch changes from version 5 to 7.
  • Lots of smaller changes to the application, and to the application management tooling. Mostly Ruby on Rails
  • Bespoke database backup system to provide encrypted offsite backups plus de-identified backups suitable for use in test environments

Key technologies:⌗

  • Terraform, Chef
  • AWS: RDS, EC2, ECS, Aurora, all the usual suspects
  • Ruby on Rails, Python, SQL

eSSENTIAL Accessibility, Product Manager⌗

August 2019 to October 2019

Product Manager for eSSENTIAL’s System Of Record and Accessibility Scanner products. Due to my technical background I have also taken on some technical work that is outside the scope of a typical product management role.

Key points:⌗

  • Liaison across the company and with client stakeholders to guide requirements specifications and priorities
  • Product roadmapping
  • Management of production infrastructure on AWS
  • Performance tuning of WordPress
  • QA/bug-testing products, looking for corner-cases and reporting with as much detail as possible to Engineering
  • Bugfixes and some coding in the core application (TypeScript running on Node)

AccessibilityOz, Technical Accessibility Specialist / CTO⌗

February 2012 to July 2019

Product development, internal tooling, technical accessibility consulting for internal and external clients.

Key points:⌗

  • Clients are largely public sector. Australian government departments, Australian and US tertiary education institutions, and some large corporations
  • Built OzART, the AccessibilityOz Automated Reporting Tool. This is an automated accessibility testing and remediation tool, mapping approximately 600 accessibility defects to WCAG 2.0 success criteria. In addition to picking out the ~30% of accessibility problems that can be automatically tested, the tool guides testers of varying levels of expertise through testing the potential problems that require human judgement.
  • Web site builds for clients using WordPress. Focus on accessibility. Some examples include:
  • Scoping of new products, e.g., a devops integrated accessibility testing tool
  • Helped scope and manage development of OzPlayer, an accessible web video player, including building a - WordPress plugin and interactive code generator
  • Management of technical infrastructure, including Office365, Linux hosting for OzART on AWS, Azure, and smaller providers, website hosting on AWS, and configuration management with Puppet
  • Provided technical accessibility advice to clients, both internal and external. For example evaluating a proposed carousel, looking at proposed marketing assets to evaluate accessibility, and providing technical portions of training courses.
  • Ghost-wrote articles on technical accessibility issues, for example “The Unbearable Inaccessibility of Slideshows” on SitePoint: https://www.sitepoint.com/unbearable-accessible-slideshow/
  • Accessibility testing, particularly coding-related (as opposed to content-related) issues
  • Many briefs for management, distilling technical issues into language understandable to a broad audience

Key technologies:⌗

  • Python 3: Flask, Selenium, a little Django, a little Pandas
  • PHP: WordPress themes and plugins, Blade templating
  • Perl: Dancer, Moose, Class::MethodMaker
  • JavaScript: mainly jQuery, a little VueJS and Svelte
  • HTML 5, CSS 3, SASS, LESS, Grunt/Webpack workflow
  • WCAG 2.1, WAI-ARIA

Investment Technology Group, Systems Administrator and DBA⌗

August 2007 to August 2011 Part of Australian, and then US, operations teams managing UNIX-based trading platforms and development environments. Primarily a Solaris environment with some Linux, supporting on the order of 700 machines across a global network covering at least six timezones, probably more.

Implemented Puppet on top of existing critical infrastructure, performance tuning for ultra-low-latency networking on Solaris for HFT systems, managed migration from ASE 12 to ASE 15 for production trading infrastructure.

Buzzwords: Solaris, ZFS, Linux, Sybase ASE, NetApp, ITIL, Puppet

University of Melbourne, Systems Programmer⌗

December 2002 to August 2007

Part of the central Information Division team managing UNIX systems - Solaris, Tru64, and Red Hat Linux. We provided platform support for a range of large IT systems, including Blackboard LMS, Oracle FInancials, and ExLibris Metalib/SFX/Digitool.

Worked with stakeholders across the University as part of a working group looking at organisation-wide email and calendaring.

Further back on request