Owen RL Smith - Curriculum Vitae
- Full Name
- Owen RL Smith
- Contact
- owen@orls.co.uk (Further details available upon request)
- Location
- London, UK
- Nationality
- British
- Role Sought
- Full-time permanent roles in backend web & data systems development
Education
London School of Economics & Political Science, Aldwych, London
- Enrolment
- September 2004 — July 2007
- Course
- Joint Honours in Government & History
- Focus
- Modern history of the Middle East & the Arab-Israeli Conflict, modern political philosophy & theories of government.
- Degree Achieved
1st Class BSc (Hons) in Government & History
Winchester College, Winchester, Hampshire
- Enrolment
- September 1998 — July 2003
- Qualifications
- 8x GCSEs (maximum offered): 5 A*, 3 A
3x AS+A2: Maths, Economics & History (all A)
2x AS: Geography (B) & English (A)
Core IT skill areas
- Effective modern client-side development:
- HTML (4, X, ‘5’), CSS (2, 3)
- DOM/Browser-environment Javascript (vanilla, jQuery, Ojay)
- AJAX-family technologies and techniques, e.g. JSONP
- Tenacious, if imperfect, cross-browser compatibility.
- Server-side Javascript (Node.js platform).
- PHP (incl. CodeIgniter & Wordpress).
- Java (J2EE, some Spring)
- Long term affair with Python, flirting with Ruby, dirty weekends with Scala
- Familiar with objective, imperative, prototypical and functional paradigms. Eyeing pure-functional languages with cautious curiosity.
- Relational databases; MySQL, PostgresSQL, some exposure to MS SQL Server.
- Non-relational datastores; Redis, CouchDB, Lucene.
- Web and Data service design: Truly RESTful services & religious HTTP, or SOAP/RPC-family. Staunch (now victorious) holdout against WS-*. MVC and Resource-oriented architectural patterns.
- Version Control and toolchain: Git, SVN, CVS, Ant+Ivy, Phing+PEAR, Maven, Capistrano, Hudson/Jenkins.
- Mac OSX preference. Windows if required. Comfortable on *nix systems/Bash shell, primarily Linux (Ubuntu, some Gentoo & CentOS familiarity).
- Heathen typing tools (Textmate, Eclipse).
- Experience with several development workflow / collaboration tools, e.g. Trac, Jira/Confluence, Pivotal Tracker.
Professional background
June 2009 - present: OTHERmedia Ltd, London
Progressed from Support Coordinator to Senior Developer within a mid-size digital agency.
Senior Developer
Responsibilities include backend development for large consumer-facing and commerce sites such as Paul Smith, Jasper Conran, the Royal Collection, ECB, BAFTA and a long tail of ~30 other clients.
- Ongoing end-to-end development, new features, and maintenance for large complex projects.
- Designing technical architectures for modern, distributed data-driven, service-oriented projects.
- Developed innovative caching & scalability systems within & alongside a legacy Java stack.
- Prototyping, developing proofs-of-concept, and triaging new technologies.
- Led internal projects to bring in a ‘DevOps’ mentality & modernize software engineering methodology; including version control systems & practices, continuous integration & testing, infrastructure buildout techniques, and robust deployment practices.
- Overseeing front-end development and support, including complex Javascript interfaces.
- Active in staff mentoring and training across all technical areas.
Support Coordinator
Responsibilities included managing day-to-day client relationships and ongoing development projects for clients in post-launch mode.
- Worked with more than 20 clients over time, managing over 40 separate web properties.
- Managed client relationships from the frontline, including advising on contract renegotiations.
- Took on a junior developer role alongside the management role, learning Java while contributing to front-end development.
- Coordinated an internal process review and revamp for project management/personnel tools.
- Helped change development management, decreasing context-switching and increasing focus.
- Reduced support ticket backlog by more than half, and increased burn rate & billing.
- Managed, and developed for, an 11th-hour infrastructure project to scale out a complex and previously unstable application, successfully handling the company’s largest ever request traffic volume (BAFTA awards night; Proxy caching with custom invalidation to allow for realtime updates & comments).
April 2008 - June 2009: Web Data Editor, Stanfords Ltd, London
Core responsibilities included expanding, managing and finessing a large e-commerce product catalogue for a specialist & very demanding subject field (Travel & Cartography). This role grew to include broader data systems management, overseeing a 3-way catalogue systems migration and integration project.
- Core role involved copywriting, data cleaning & visual display for e-commerce catalogue.
- Managed a team of part-time catalogue editors & copywriters.
- Coordinated web marketing strategy with marketing team & senior management.
- Acted as technical owner for bidirectional e-commerce data integration projects with external digital agency.
- Reworked internal data systems to reduce failure rates & downtime.
- Developed and integrated internal reporting tools & productivity metrics.
- Built tools to migrate from a legacy Pick/D3 database (the original NoSQL system) via a custom PHP VT100-based adapter system.
General Interests & Side projects
- Tache.io – a simple, scalable, neat tool for transforming web content.
- Graphyql – an information dashboard powered by open YQL queries. Built in a hurry for the 10k Apart contest.
- Information visualization, particularly Cartography, digital or otherwise.
- Participating in the London developer community (User groups & meetups).
- Odd obsession with CMS/administrative-tool design, development & usability.
- The internet. All of it.
- Science fiction, ‘futurism’, & the Great Acceleration.
- Music. Alt-this, post-that.
- Computer games & 3D graphics, esp. modding, hacking & making them.