Scott Williams

Lead Software Engineer/Architect

My work at Hublsoft has left me as the individual leading architectural change and transformation of our product. I also lead/own all our deployment, CI and local development workflows, migrating taking us from a company relying on shared remote resources for even the simplest of local development to being able to now spin up and develop our complete product stack, completely locally and off the corporate network via hosting and running the entire application in a local or remote Kubernetes cluster.

The bulk of my work has been to get us to this point, migrating projects written in .net framework to .net core. Migrating our build process form on prem based TeamCity server over to GitHub action, producing Linux container images for all our services. As part of this migration also having to continue to support and update our on premises/VM based deployment model orchestrated using octopus deploy.

As a member of the Technical Steering Group (along with 2 other senior/lead engineers and the CTO) I have a high level of ownership on the technical direction of the product with my main focus on the .NET backend system and hosting architecture.

Another major focus here is based around developer productivity, building tools (see Localdev above) and frameworks to facilitate the rest of the team to be able to rapid iterate on the product without having to worry about how it all hangs together during their inner loop of development.

Lead Developer

While working at MD Insurance Services I have proven my vision and architectural design skills, by starting as a Senior developer and by being instrumental in pushing forth industry best practices like code reviews, CI/CD , by liaise with business users to help engineer a design to match their goals, by guiding the wider team of both senior and junior developers along the vision for the desired solution. Thus, being promoted to Lead.

Along with guiding the overall architectural design of our in house developed system I provide I direct support and mentoring to other members on the team and helping them to find solutions to solve their development tasks.

The major project I am responsible for is the CRiSP risk and policy management system that now runs as the core platform for most of the business needs, for onboarding new clients via a suite of public facing portals, to internal specialist internal ones for specialized business areas. I.E. specialized/simplified interface for our surveying field staff.

Not only I am responsible for the design and direction of the platform my responsibilities also include keeping both our large suite of QA environments running but also deploying, monitoring and ensuring our production system ticks along smoothly to aid in this I developed a robust DevOps pipeline that supports deploying all our components out with little downtime with on going work to re-platform to provide as close to zero downtime deployments.

Senior Developer

During my time employed at 2020 Legal I had been directly responsible for improving development practices and producing high impact systems.

In my role I had complete autonomy about technical architecture of the systems and been instrumental in the technical direction of the development team, this includes introducing best practice development procedures, moving the company over from using SVN over to git and introducing the gitflow development pattern, worked to improve the continuous build/deployment workflow by moving deployment over to octopus deploy to provide a central deployment solution across our projects, and also move company over to a SOA for internal systems and implementing a middleware service wrapping the data provided by the CRM used to provide a clean API 2 directional to integrate new tools. Also as a proof of concept of the API I migrated the existing customer portals over to run from it exclusively.

I produced a multitude of technical systems for 2020 Legal from small single integration pieces (producing a system to work around the technical limitations of the CRM being used). To large scale(effecting every single employee in the company) systems for managing outgoing mail/printing/documents (see EDS and PEX).

In addition to the above projects, as a full stack developer, I have reprised my skills from my previous employment to rebuild most of the company’s websites using Umbraco.

Developer

Over the long period of time I have been employed at ICE I have progressed from being a junior developer all the way up to the mid-level/senior developer was when I left am today. In my role I am acting as the technical lead/architect on all software being produced (Being the point of decision for both back-end and front-end development choices) not only am I responsible for leading the technical direction of the team I am also a full stack developer and fully deliver full solutions myself, developing both front end and back end solutions for internal and external clients alike.

During my time at ICE I’ve been involved with a large variety of different projects. My first project(Healthy Schools Programme website) was re-factoring a hybrid VB.NET/C#, single layered, WebForms solution into an n-tier C# application (and later re-developing it as an multi-application MVC system), all whilst constantly improving/expanding the feature set. Later on as my skills expanded and I progressed up the job ladder I was given more and more responsibility over the full development life-cycle of projects, from scope all the way to development and deployment. Two internal projects that I did have full responsibility of delivery for was a bespoke CRM for our in house stop smoking service, and our SaaS hosting service. The CRM was a WinForms application using a local CouchDB as a offline multi-master replicating datastore with a customized reporting solution build on top of couchDB’s map/reduce capabilities, whilst the SaaS solution was built around a core MVC and WebAPI solutions, with satellite Umbraco based sites liking in as a data/user/settings store.

In addition to the above projects, as a full stack developer, I have been responsible for producing countless websites for clients, developing the solution, to implementing the designs and then wiring up the JavaScript to back-end web-services I developed. The types of websites I have been responsible for over the years have varied in scope from simple brochure sites to complex web application used for tracking physical activity.

Finally I have a wider experiences than just developing websites, I also have also been responsible for developing web connected mobile applications (using both Phonegap and Titanium mobile), and systems that run on touchscreen kiosks using web technologies.

Helpdesk technician

During my time here parts of my job involved taking help desk calls, then trying to replicate the errors and investigation into the problem the user is facing while using a bespoke piece of software being implemented by multiple NHS trusts and hospitals around the country. Also having to do data preparation by developing SQL scripts to extract live data from databases for later use in updates and reports. My responsibilities also included managing the office network as the office technical support personal, with a primary responsibility, but not limited, to maintain the web, SQL and files servers, also in the role of Technical Support officer I was responsible in supporting the technical network solutions for our clients.

University of Wales Aberystwyth

Some of the skills I developed at my time here are; Project Management, Teamwork, Programming, Internet Development tools, Internet technologies.

Birkenhead Sixth Form College