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Employment & Education
November 2014 – Present Automattic, WordPress VIP
In November 2014, Automattic acquired Code For The People in order to gain the people in the company, and we were moved into the VIP hosting team. I’m currently a VIP Launch Engineer at Automattic, and help launch enterprise clients. I’ve worked with companies such as Facebook, Time, CBS, NewsCorp, PMC, and others.
November 2013 – November 2014 Code For The People
Working remotely within a team and on my own I helped produce several projects, including cyclingweekly.co.uk, and maintenance on mickjagger.com.
May 2011 – November 2013 interconnect/it
Working with WordPress doing front and back end work, I’ve built several large websites, plugins, a commercial product. Notable sites include ovum.com, & blogs.nottingham.ac.uk, websites that I planned, built, and maintain, including a large amount of automation.
I worked with 2 developers and a designer both on my own and as a team. I also worked with groups and management at the client end to liaise and coordinate deployment and development. I also designed and built a commercial plugin called the Auditor, amongst other open source libraries and plugins.
August 2011 – January 2013 Freelance
While working at interconnect/it I produced websites and code for various people, such as Compass Designs and Rockhaq.com. A notable piece of work was the Café Blend website, contracted on behalf of Rachel Mc’Collin of Compass Designs, it involved a responsive website with an events system. As of 2013, I halted further freelance work as I felt that the pressures of having a full time job and freelance projects meant that I had less time and spare capacity to work on personal projects.
August 2010 – May 2011 QuadroNation
As a web developer here I mainly produced WordPress websites, along with work on lemon stand. I worked in a small team with another PHP developer and a graphics designer.
While working at QuadroNation, I was heavily involved in the design and construction of sites for Brodex Water Treatment, and Baa Bar amongst others.
2008-2009 SCEE/Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
During a one year industrial work placement, I worked as an Assistant Programmer for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe in the development department in Liverpool. This included work with Perforce and Playstation 3 developer kits. I implemented various tools integrating with Visual Studio 2005, and shadowed other employees to learn about the software and techniques being used. I learnt a lot from observing the development cycle of Wipeout HD during its latter stages, and the early stages of Wipeout HD Fury development.
2006-2010 Liverpool John Moores University, Computer Games Technology
I acquired a 2.1 classification while studying at LJMU. I built games involving Open GL and DirectX on my own and in group course works. My final year project was an Realtime Strategy AI built in C++ & Lua.
Skills and Experience
I have strong knowledge and experience of PHP, C++, Java, CSS, Javascript, and HTML to an advanced level, and intermediate ability in Python, Lua, SQL, C# amongst other languages. I’m currently taking active steps to learn Objective C & Node.js, and consolidate my knowledge of PHP frameworks beyond WordPress.
In the past I’ve built desktop applications involving OpenGL & DirectX 2D/3D graphics, integrated dynamic scripting languages into statically compiled strictly typed languages, architected socket based networking code in multiple languages, and built game AIs. All of which working on multiple platforms.
I’m comfortable on a range of platforms & machines, developing using Linux/OSX/Windows, and a wide range of editors and IDEs. I’m also comfortable doing front end & backend work, using SVN & Git version control via cli.
Public Speaking
I enjoy attending conferences, but specifically, I try to speak whenever I can. At the time of writing I’ve spoken at:
- WordCamp Norway
- WordCamp Europe 2014 Bulgaria
- WordCamp Europe Vienna
- WordCamp Europe 2019 Berlin
- WordCamp Lancaster
- WordCamp Sheffield
- WordCamp London
- WordCamp NYC
I also ran WordCamp Manchester 2017, and help run WordCamp Europe Contributor day each year by setting up new machines.
Open Source Contributions
I’ve contributed to numerous projects, and created my own. These include among others:
- Documentation and bug fixes
- Composer-press, a plugin to retroactively assemble a composer.json based on the repositories and plugins present in a running WordPress install.
- Further WordPress plugins and themes on WordPress.org and Github.
- Talks at local and national conferences
I’m also an elected community moderator at WordPress Stack Exchange, and consistently within the top 15 ranking users. At the time or writing I am ranked the #12 highest of ~132,465 users, with a reach of 2.2m.
AI
I currently have two C++ AI projects named NTai and Shard that can be played against offline in Real time strategy games (e.g. Starcraft/Supreme Commander). Both are open source projects licensed under LGPL v2
During 2007-2008 the NTai project was incorporated into the course Games & AI, of the Master AI at the Universiteit Maastricht (Netherlands). I was in constant contact with the students and their professor during their assignment, advising, and receiving feedback. NTai was also used in a publication Opponent Modeling in Real-time Strategy Games by Frederik Schadd, Sander Bakkes and Pieter Spronck, alongside other AI projects
References
Available on request