Expert and responsible developer with excellent pragmatic judgement. A variety of senior level experience in diverse domains. Smart, flexible, honest and gets things done.

Technologies: ruby, ruby-on-rails, postgresql, python, django, mysql, javascript, html, linux

Experience

Head of Development, mySociety, June 2017 – Current

mySociety builds websites and tools for empowering citizens.

  • Day-to-day management of the development team
  • Ensuring strategy and plans in place, working with teams to produce roadmaps
  • Establishing development practices and procedures across the team
  • Setting career development paths for developers

Senior Developer, mySociety, April 2009 – June 2017

  • Lead developer since 2012 on Alaveteli, an open-source platform for making public Freedom of Information requests. Alaveteli powers WhatDoTheyKnow, and around twenty other sites worldwide. Over 250,000 Freedom of Information requests have been made using Alaveteli.
  • Developed FixMyTransport, which helps people report problems they’ve experienced on public transport. FixMyTransport was shortlisted for a Nominet Award in Online Public Services & Information.
  • Set priorities, handle feature requests and provide technical support to international partners, write code, review code from other contributors, and work to create a collaborative and inclusive technical culture.

Technical Director (volunteer position), Sandbag Climate Campaign, October 2008 – April 2013

Sandbag is a not-for-profit research and campaigning organisation focused on effective European climate policy.

  • As a founding company director, helped build the organisation into one that ‘punches above its weight’, producing high profile reports, briefings and consultation submissions on emissions trading policy.
  • As technical lead, built the framework for the acquisition, integration and analysis of the emissions data that informs Sandbag’s work, and produced interactive maps to help others understand it.

Director, Visible Red Ltd, March 2007 – April 2009

Worked as part of a three-person skunkworks inside Parliament.

  • Prototyped services for e-petitions and the representation of bill amendments. The e-petitions prototype informed the work of the Procedure Committee tasked with making proposals on the subject.
  • Produced the Historic Hansard site, putting Hansard from 1803 to 2005 online. This included nice features, such as the identification and de-duplication of speakers, that were not present on the contemporary Parliament site at the time.

Self-employed Software Developer, July 2005 – March 2007

  • Developed early versions of Nature Protocols and Nature Network for the Nature Publishing Group.
  • Built prototypes illustrating possible futures for Action Network for the BBC.
  • Produced Cineworld website payment, newsletter and registration components for Souk Digital.

Senior Manager, Informatics Research Scientist, Exelixis Inc., 2002 – July 2005

Exelixis is a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing small molecule therapies.

  • Led data warehousing project team to support timely internal reporting of company drug data.
  • Refactored obsolete Java ‘extract, transform and load’ tool.
  • Spearheaded the adoption of standard warehousing technology and best practices.
  • Led project to develop a scientific literature knowledge management system.
  • Achieved high level of tool adoption across different groups by giving tailored presentations and training, significantly reducing the time scientists spent on some knowledge intensive tasks.

Software Engineer, Extempo Systems Inc., 2001 – 2002

Extempo Systems was a startup using intelligent agent technology in entertainment, training and learning.

  • Maintained a systems architecture to support interactive web agents, based on natural language processing and generation software.
  • Designed and created database-driven web learning and reporting applications.

Programmer, Broadband Communications, 2000 – 2001

Broadband Communications was a web agency.

  • Worked in a small team on a variety of database-driven web application projects in ColdFusion and Java.

Education

PhD, Nottingham University, 1997 – 2001

  • Thesis on “Software Agents for Internet-based Knowledge Engineering”
  • Designed and implemented a Java-based multi-agent architecture for acquiring, viewing, structuring and merging large amounts of knowledge from multiple Internet sources.
  • Published several papers, and presented research internationally.

M.Sc. I.T. , Nottingham University, 1995 – 1996

  • Developed sound knowledge of interface design, usability issues and human factors, neural networks and multimedia authoring and programming.
  • Awarded a distinction.

B.A. Psychology, Nottingham University, 1992 – 1995

  • Specialized in Artificial Intelligence, cognitive and social psychology.
  • Awarded first-class honours.
  • Received the Pumphrey Prize for essay discussing natural and artificial intelligence, expert systems and top-down versus bottom-up approaches to AI.