I hold a 1st class honours degree in Electronic & Electrical Engineering, where my fascination with software development emerged despite the technical depth of my studies. Upon graduation, I swiftly immersed myself in the dynamic realm of embedded programming, evolving from a junior developer to embracing languages such as Java, C#, and more recently, NodeJS, as the internet landscape unfolded.
Transitioning into a Solutions Architect role at CompareTheMarket allowed me to further cultivate my passion for building robust systems. My journey continued when Talent Consulting entrusted me with leading their IT team, concurrently engaging in architecting projects within the public sector, predominantly in Azure, with additional expertise in AWS.
Having traversed diverse sectors like education, retail, and insurance, I've donned various hats—from Senior Software Engineer to Head of Architecture. Two driving passions define my professional ethos: crafting straightforward solutions to address customer challenges and steering initiatives towards seamless transitions from on-premise to cloud, especially in the realm of greenfield cloud solutions.
In my current capacity, I engage in a dynamic blend of 70% hands-on project work, contributing to the delivery of solution and infrastructure projects in the cloud. The remaining 30% is dedicated to leadership responsibilities, where I actively nurture and build a permanent team. My focus extends beyond project execution; I am committed to instilling a culture of community practice, refining work methodologies, and implementing best practices for delivering innovative solutions to our public sector clients.
My rich experience has underscored a fundamental truth—teams don't organically form; they require the right individuals exhibiting the right behaviors. Coupled with clear direction and a well-defined career path, this combination cultivates a sense of ownership and community—hallmarks of success in thriving organizations.
Implementation of Application and APi level securities, security by design
Technical leadership and documenting services created by my team
Mentoring and coaching of team members across the department
Technical leadership across the department at an Applications Architect level
Azure and AWS platforms used to host, more experience in AWS
Implementations RabbitMQ, NServiceBus and Tib/Rendezvous
Experience in writing .Net services and applications. These range from stand alone installations for private clients to bespoke public facing sites.
I have written many applications using Apache, PHP and MySQL. These range from public facing sites to administration areas for internal sites.
Micro-services written in NodeJs as express and node are a good fit with fast development time and easy POC
Used the following application in order to deploy amd develop
Brought in to create a permanent team at Talent to scale faster for our current and future projects, This encompasses building a team of people at all levels from .NET Developer, Cloud engineers, Sec-ops and all levels of architect, focusing on Security Architecture, Cloud and networking based in Azure
Building an identity for Talent to bring in new skills and people, by updating our website, making sure it of the same standards as the standards we uphold in the public sector (GDS)
Generating career paths, ways of working and standards and governance documents that we as Talent adhere to and publishing these on our github repository, demonstrating to our tech community that we are a company that is inclusive, open and cares for our employees and their career path
Helping architect specific solutions for our clients at the DfE and ESFA, to move forward the huge digital transformation in the public sector across all departments
Chaired of the Tech forum, a meeting twice weekly where tech is discussed and people bring their ideas to the table for solving common problems. These could be common library solutions for HTTP clients, to what is currently on our tech radar as accepted, obsolete. Presentations to the forum to discuss issues the teams are having.
Responsible for several working groups looking into governance of our micro-services and how we consume, document and test these at both an integration level and contract level. Lead the team on rolling out contract testing across 3 geographical sites, which involved workshops, presentations and one on one coaching.
Attended many tech leadership, speaking and influencing workshops where the lessons learned were implemented in real world to bring people along in the journey at CompareTheMarket.
Mentoring and coaching of firstly, technical leads, and other developers looking to progress their careers or looking for advice in how to solve specific problems within their teams
Responsible for the architectural vision for the new Pricing Platform at CompareTheMarket. Focused on developing scalability, stability and security for the system, keeping the customer at the centre of our business.
Always looking to perform investigations into better ways of solving specific issues with cloud based technology, for example serverless vs EC2, Kafka vs RabbitMQ. Spent time bringing solutions to the table in terms of POC and present these to the Architecture Forum for discussion. Many of these were to either increase performance for existing event driven systems or expose current processes out to the business teams so they can make better decisions.
Moving the platform over to a micro-service architecture allowing almost zero system downtime, multiple deployments per day whilst also supporting load spikes on areas of the system when marketing campaigns kicked in or we had the 'martin lewis affect'
Leading a team which developed, maintain and increase performance of the new quoting platform which can supported 1000's of transactions a second.
Hosted in AWS and using distributed micro services across RabbitMQ, the platform is fully scalable and uses MongoDb to store data sent to the platform. REST based services using HATEOS to allow customer journeys to communicate with the aggregated providers to get quotes for risks sent to the system.
Responsible for mentoring developers across the department and designing personal development plans for each individual as well as providing technical leadership in my team.
Working closely with the architects it is my responsibility for the technical solutions following the architectural vision.
Responsible for driving technical excellence and security/immunisation across the CompareTheMarket infrastructure, creating the governance that allows teams to consume the services we write.
A new platform to move away from old legacy core services that were difficult to maintain. Built on AWS and deployed with Teamcity/GoCD with bespoke scripts wrapping the AWS CLI.
Designed with Security and Diagnostics up front to allow low barrier to entry for new developers amd maintainers. Monitored with Grafana and Prometheus and using pager duty for alerting.
Real-time update of new provider adapters that map requests and responses to and from the CTM domain model allowing zero downtime.
Autoscaling supported for the 'Martin Lewis Affect' where high spike loads, but also designed to fail gracefully with a distributed message bus (RabbitMQ) to give a service to the many under these conditions.
Writing new indicative quote process that allows us to drive users to a page indicating their policies are due for expiry and a calculation is pre initialised. Using KnockoutJS for front end UI on a single SPA application.
Brought in to help develop and maintain the new Snap2Quote energy offering allowing customers to send their energy bills directly to the system as a photo to get current quotes for their location.
Administration web interface for users to enter bill data, apple app used by customer to capture bill. Small team that brought the offering in under 3 months, giving return on investment in minimal time.
Joined a team as part of allocated seating roll-out (hosted off site in azure), developing the functionality to allow customers to choose seats on the main easyjet.com website, one of the top revenue generating sites in the UK.
Part of a team developing new functionality on the www.tescoentertainment.com website and supporting applications.
Part of a team developing new functionality for the main OCR Examination portal for Cambridge University. A site that supports a base of 35,000 different centres across the world managing their candidate entries and results through one site.
Formed company developing online management systems predominately written in C# .NET 2.0/3.5 but small scale site developed in LAMP
Senior developer in 12 man team within the Mobile Development department developing mobile applications and desktop web portals to configure them.
1st Class honours
Apart from enjoying work in the IT sector, I regularly play football and tennis. I enjoy spending time with my family and have 2 boys aged 13 and 17 who also enjoy most sports. I can also be found on the river bank fishing on the broads
I enjoy watching movies and playing chess when the weather is not the best