A solution architect with 20+ years development, devops, cloud architecture and managerial experience in commercial and enterprise environments. I am a pragmatic, well organised and confident decision maker with experience leading and mentoring teams of mixed technical abilities in fast moving agile environments.
I love digital technology, learn quickly and possess a broad range of industry experience. I build solutions and relish discovering, learning and using new technology to solve problems. I am inspired by working on stimulating and exciting cutting edge projects with a team of like-minded, driven and, most importantly, fun individuals.
I am great at communicating concepts with a passion for cognitive simplicity and pragmatism. I take pride in my work and am a strong advocate of reusable solutions and automation. Knowledge is best shared and I am keen to actively promote knowledge sharing though workshops, tutorials and blog posts.
I am currently employed as a Solutions Architect at New Relic.
Contact CV ExperienceI gained a love of photography from my father and have more than 10,000 photos online going back to the 70’s.
For a challenge I took part in a year-long 365 project which involved taking a photo every day for a whole year - an amazing and rewarding challenge.
I can't claim to be a health freak, but I do love competitve sports and am always up for a game of table tennis or pool. I play disc golf - which is like golf but with a frisbee instead of clubs and balls - and am an active member of Croydon disc golf club. It's a great way to keep fit and get out into the countryside. I'm still crap... more practice required.
Over the years I have cobbled together a number of websites, iOS apps and bits and pieces in my free time (aka commuting). Most of my published iOS apps were built either to satisfy my own curiosity (Match Batch,Crags), to fulfil a need (NoteBrainer and Mobius) or for the community (CDGC). With the arrival of my daughter and a change of focus in my career and personal hobbies the free time to develop apps has sadly evaporated for now. You can find out more about my apps here.
I enjoy cooking for family and friends and am currently trying to learn perfect pizza using my own home made cheese and a real wood fired oven.
Of course, I also like being cooked for, and enjoy (occasional) fine dining in fancy restaurants with my wife. Some of my favourite restaurants are The Whitebrook, Gidleigh Park (under Michael Caines) and Murano.
A scientist and engineer at heart. I like to know how things work and how to fix them again after I break them. I love innovative and new technologies and am known to have the odd gadget or two - some of which get use, and others... less so. Space travel and exploration particularly captivate my imagination and I read a lot of science fiction to get closer to the stars. Im an avid fan of SpaceX and the Apolllo program. Nearer to the ground I am fascinated by how the earth is formed and how the passage of time affects this place we call home.
Sometimes I just like to sit in the sunshine by the pool and read a good book. (At least I did before I hada three year old!) When I am feeling more adventurous though I like to get out and explore the country side. A recent magical trip was to western USA where my wife and I drove over 2,500 miles through unbelievable natural landscapes. I love to ski, enjoying the crisp mountain air and comforts of cake and an open fire after a long day. Closer to home I enjoy the occasional weekend camping (as long as there is a real camp fire) and walks around our local countryside.
I have been designing digital solutions my entire career focused chiefly on web based consumer applications on the internet. My main strengths resolve around being able to understand, balance and clearly articulate both requirements and solutions. I try to listen and understand before making decisions or offering advice. I don't live in an ivory tower: I am never afraid to change course and re-engineer when required. I believe it is important to clearly document and summarise information and find tools such as UML, if used carefully, essential in recording and communicating concise information in an understandable manner. Im known for my diagrams - you cant beat a good diagram!
Javascript is well and trully back in fashion. One of the primary projects I am currently working with involves using node.js coupled with the excellent React library to transform the online shopping experience for Tesco. Web development has changed significantly from when I first started out: Gone are the days where javascript and css needed to be carefully (and painfully) curated for individual browser quirks. Whilst I am no longer at the coal face of client side CSS and HTML I do keep abreast of developments and remain engaged with developers particularly server side
I have worked with Amazon AWS to design and build cloud based infrastructure for development, testing and production. I love the way infrastructure is no longer constrained by unreliable hardware, purchasing lead times and wacky sysads. I have completed an Amazon accredited Architecting AWS but this is barely significant compared to the extensive experience I have aquired building enterprise infrastructure for Tesco. I have had some experience with Azure and Heroku too; they're ok.
Container based deployments are a hot topic in the world of virtualised environments and services. I have experience with both Docker and the Amazon container services platform. This is a great way to ship code reliably across environments and I am excited by the prospect of moving to server-less deployments such as those offered by the lambda AWS service.
Cloud infrastructure is tough to keep on top of. Managing it with code not only simplifies the management but also provides ample auditing, traceability and roll back potential. I really like the way tools such as Terraform allow us to build comprehensive, immutable, provider-agnostic infrastructure on which we can make real-time delta changes without down time. My jaw hit the floor when I first saw what it could do. I now use it every day to reliably manage all our AWS environments.
Agile development can only be possible when the entire process from beginning to end supports the rapid development, prototyping, deployment and testing of code. I have developed and helped drive adoption of automated code-driven build pipelines using Jenkins and hosted solutions such as CircleCI. These tools allow incredibly rapid code, test and deploy cycles. Couple these with collaboration tools like Jira and Slack allow a development team can produce more to a higher quality than ever before.
I believe you can only be great at a programming language if you are using it daily. Whilst I do not claim to be an expert coder in any one language I have had broad experience of all sorts of programming languages. I can generally pick up new concepts and syntax quickly and start using them to build things straight away. I can usuually get something useful working pretty quick! Some of the languages and scripting technologies I have used in the past include Pascal, Z (never, ever again... please), C & C++, Delphi, ActionScript, PHP, Perl, Javascript (client and server), Java, Appcelerator, Swift, Objective-c, Bash, Regex, x-Path, XML, Obyx, Medusa, x86 Assembly, Basic, Varnish VCL, Visual Basic, Apache, Nginx, SQL, even C64 and spectrum back in the day.
I like the iOS ecosystem and the opportunities it has provided to developers. I support the mobile app teams at Tesco, have coded for fun for many years on the platform and have released a variety of different apps over the years. As an early adopter I had to struggle through poor objective-c documentation and reference code. It was a challenge, but things are easier now with Swift and multiple javascript frameworks like PhoneGap and Appcelerator (with which I have also published some apps with).
I am well versed in traditional 'SQL' relational database technology with many years of experience in designing, building, optimising and maintaining databases supporting web applications. I enjoy the purity, elegance and logic of relational databases and would love to explore further the new territory provided by alternative paradigms like noSQL and big data. I have some experience wih elasticsearch and Hadoop but would love to gain more.
I have been using *nix since university, some 20 or so years, and so am at home with a command line interface and the common linux applications and commands. I been using web servers almost as long and have considerable experience with the Apache web server. More recently nodejs has been at the forefront. I find most of the key concepts and abilities of Apache are mirrored in other server software like IIS and nginx. It will be interesting to see how these client server architectures evolve as their space is invaded by modern application servers and server-less design.
I am often suprised by how few people really understand how the internet works. It is so important to grasp what is going on beneath and I have extensive experience working at detail with all the layers of networking including the core transport protocols, DNS, SMTP, SSL and TLS encryption, TCP/IP, etc. I find having a good understanding of all these core techologies helps when desiging secure software that relies upon them.
I have considerable experience designing RESTful API's in service orientated architectures and also have experience consuming and dealing with the challenges service consumption can have on application performance and reliability. I have significant experience with Apigee API manager having designed, built and automated Tesco's API portal. I like the way microservices can empower teams to focus on excellence by reducing the problem space into easily manageable chunks. I think demand driven data schemes such as that offered by GraphQL could really change they way we look at data APIs.
How do we know if its any good if we are not measuring? I firmly believe that the best decisions are made with the best information and it is critical to monitor and measure everything about a site or application. I love to crunch data using a plethora of tools but Splunk and New Relic are my favourites that I use extensiviely for root cause and log analysis. I also love a good regular expression and you should see what I can do in Excel! Information is power: instrument everything!
If ever there was a more divisive and misunderstood term then 'content management' would be up there. I have spent many years working with managed content, playing an instrumental role in the design and build of 'Builder' the content management system used by Red Snapper. I have experience with many other content management systems such as Wordpress, Drupal and the god-awful Teamsite.
My current role involves helping enterprise customers level up on their Observability tooling with New Relic. I develop bespoke solutions, provide best practice training and provide technical expertise to the EMEA customer success team.
Responsible for the design, implementation and stability of the cloud infrastructure running a £4bn grocery website and mobile apps. I lead a team that provides both customer-facing production and developer-facing development environments. We are fully infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, Azure DevOps and Jenkins to provide a comprehensive continuous integration and deployment platform for the engineering teams. We leverage automated containerised application deployment with auto scaling & healing to control costs and boost performance. Primary project currently is migrating entire AWS infrastructure to Azure.
Additionally I managed a team of developers that build and maintain a shopping experience API that provides a consolidated interface to multiple backend services and API's for our web and mobile applications. We leverage graphQL to provide a performant and stable API that abstracts and aggregates the underlying business logic and makes backend API transition and evolution transparent to our consumers.
Supporting all aspects of the technical design and build of a new breed of native mobile apps. Additionally overseeing design and implementation of API gateway, realtime application business metric monitoring, abstracted analytics data modeling and infrastructure design and monitoring.
Primarily focused on supporting the re-platforming of the UI tier from legacy IIS/.Net to nodejs/react. Design and build of multi-region code-managed cloud infrastructure, development of CI/CD platform and virgin implementation of APM and monitoring tools enabling devops run support. Incident data analysis specialist.
Scoping, designing and building features for Tesco's multi-lingual, multi-tenant international home delivery website. Lead architect supporting the development of API's and infrastructure to enable re-platforming from legacy IIS/.Net to nodejs/React.
Planning, strategy and implementation of operations across the web agency. I was tasked with developing processes for improving the working practices and general operations of all staff and departments and was involved in the running of the business supporting the other directors with development plans, sales and strategy. Amomgst technical duties I assisted with the creation of sales and finance forecasting model and successfully launched new working practices, appraisal processes and staff pensions provision.
Originally working as a traditional traditional web developer, which in those days meant coalface involvement with raw Javascript, HTML4 and a flavour of CSS best forgotten. I developed a good understanding of how the web works during this time and accumulated a firm grounding in front-end and back-end development as well as an appreciation of the merits of working within a team of developers.
Later responsibilities involved the analysis, design and implementation of bespoke web-based SQL-driven functionality and applications. I played an instrumental role in developing requirements and defining specifications of web applications for a broad range of clients. I took technical leadon jobs, which inevitably required regular direct involvement with clients in order to discuss and determine their requirements.
I worked throughout my University years. I managed a student bar which was excellent fun, supervised in the warehouse at Comet, ran the back door and night shift at Sainsbury's and filled doughnuts in the in-store bakery.
A fantastic course that I thoroughly enjoyed. I especially enjoyed the aspects of artificial intelligence and automation.
I originally created this app back in 2009 to help me learn sheet music when I started playing the piano. There were no apps on the store then that offered what I wanted so I decided to create one. I released both a free and paid pro version of the app written in objective-c. Times were hard in those days with sparse documentation and limited examples. In 2017 I rebuilt the app entireley in Swift 3 for iOS 10. I have learnt objective-c and swift building this app - but sadly my piano playing is still pretty ropey!
I wrote this app as I was struggling to learn a tune on the piano and wanted to find an app that repeated small segments of the music. There wasn’t anything like that available at the time so I decided to build my own. There are better apps now available and I have discontinued this app as it is so old and doesnt play well with the latest operating systems. It was fun whilst it lasted.
Discontinued
A course guide and scorecard for Croydon Disc Golf club. The app allows players to record and communicate their scores as well as naviagate around the course. It uses satellite information to locate tees and baskets (well sort of, not in the Russian spy sense). Its a great companion for the game and part of Croydon’s push to become a world player in the disc golf scene. (Built with Appcelerator)
When I started climbing I built this app as a way to learn the Appcelerator framework. It allows climbers to log their climbs, taking photos and annotating the climbing routes. It also includes a web share option. I rarely climb these days so this app is clinging on – its still popular in the climbing world.
Discontinued, iOS11 killed it.
A simple game written using the cocos-2d framework and objective-c as a kids learning tool. Originally free, I re-released this as a paid app to raise money for the SANDS Charity. It is now free again and looking a bit tired! The best bit about this game is the animal noises – kids love it! Sadly I do not have the time or original resources to 'retinize' all the original graphics so I fear there's only a bit of life left in this one. What I really learnt on this project was that making a game is one thing, getting anyone to download it (let alone pay for it) is a whole other problem.
Discontinued - it got booted by Apple for not having been updated for so long and because it did not support retina graphics or modern form factors :(
Whist I was learning the excellent React framework I read about a training drill for disc golf that required you to keep track of your score. I built this app whilst working abroad to see what could be done in a single day using the amazing React JS framework. Its a web-app, but it sort of works!
If you would like to contact me
drop me an email to james@5point6.net
or direct message me on twitter to @twocups
Im also on LinkedIn (who isnt?)