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PHP developer with Gorkana Group (contract)
At Gorkana I was working within a team of PHP developers (4). Our main tasks were to maintain and enhance the legacy (PHP/MySQL) parts of various sites and applications, and to assist in migrating legacy code to the new Java platform. During this I gained experience in working with ZeroMQ (0mq) and ElasticSearch. The queuing system was used to push changes into ES, and also to push data changes made in legacy applications to the new system. Other projects included refactoring, updating and enhancing an existing Rest API written using Symfony2. Gorkana planned to outsource legacy
PHP development completely, so from May 2014 onwards I remained as the sole local PHP developer with two other PHP developers offshore. In November 2014 another developer joined the remote office, and so my contract came to a natural end in December

PHP developer with Gumtree UK (contract)
After Bell Design went into liquidation, Gumtree offered me a contract to maintain the external PHP systems that had been developed at Galileo/Bell Design. I worked at Gumtree's offices within the
Product & Development team. I looked after a number of systems, but my main body of work involved the Inbound Feed System (IBFS) and the Gumtree Email Alerts. The IBFS allowed Gumtree account holders to automatically load ads into Gumtree. The system collects and transforms incoming data from a variety of formats (RMV3, DMS14, etc.) into a normalised format and imports it as
Gumtree adverts. Although Gumtree now has a pretty much fully functional API, a system like IBFS will
certainly maintained to enable SMBs to automate advertising on Gumtree. The Gumtree Email Alerts
system is a free email subscription service that allows end users to formulate a search on Gumtree and receive daily emails about new adverts that match the criteria. The system is now almost migrated into Gumtree Java based framework
During my time at Gumtree I was involved in the main migration work from Perl to Java as far as communication with the external PHP systems were concerned, and I refactored the original PHP codebase several times in order to 'talk' to the new Java system and to make use of new version of the Gumtree API
I also experienced a software development environment with Scrum and Agile methodologies, and learned a lot about test and business-driven development, continuous integration techniques, and a move from a bi-weekly release cycle to (almost) continuous delivery

Head of Development; Galileo/Bell Design
I first started at Galileo as a Software Architect. After Galileo was bought by Bell Design in September

Technical Director my role included costing, planning, managing and building websites, microsites, digital solutions such as Facebook applications and widgets. Furthermore I was in charge of preparing technical documentation, manuals, and the relevant parts of pitch documents and estimates
Projects/Clients
Digital Cinema Media: Complete redesign and rebuild of the company's website including a full CMS
This included importing legacy data from the old website
Serious/London Jazz Festival: Complete redesign and rebuild of two websites, one of which is the
London Jazz Festival site. This involved building an advanced Content Management System to specification, and the import of all old events and artists
Findababysitter: Redesign and complete new build of a child care job platform for child carers, agencies and families. Included off-the-shelf proximity search, e-commerce (integrated using)
SagePay), CMS, SEO.
Skittle Skuffle: Building a PHP/MySQL API system for a Flash based game. This included an admin tool for user data export and creating unique Skittle pack codes for bonus items

Freelancing/Contracting
I worked on a 3 month contract with Key Criteria, developing a Json API in PHP5, connecting a third party SyncML server (Funambol) with an in-house developed web application for mobile devices
www.zangbezang.com
Before that I worked on a small project for a food waste recycling company. The site uses the simple
CMS WebYep, and I have written an add-on for a news section in PHP and MySQL
www.juniperfoodwaste.com

Travelling through Europe