Edd Grant Software Engineer
Contact Details:
- Email: edd at eddgrant.com
Blog: eddgrant.com/blog
Twitter: @eddgrant
last.fm: last.fm/music/edd (Artist Profile)
LinkedIn: uk.linkedin.com/in/eddgrant
Profile:
- Talented, experienced software engineer and a hands-on technical leader
- Dedicated to ensuring the project delivers the right product, on time and to budget
- A natural problem solver who has the ability to quickly get to the root cause and design the appropriate solution
- Strong belief that clear, simple, well tested code results in high quality, maintainable and stable systems
- Has a keen interest in the practices and processes of the development team and understands the importance of these in the effectiveness of the team
- Technology enthusiast - proactive enjoys learning new and emerging technologies and the ways in which they can be applied
- Experienced at building products and development teams from scratch
Skills:
- Java expert - thorough understanding of the JVM and both standard (J2SE) and enterprise edition (J2EE) Java specifications. Many years hands-on experience in both environments
- Comprehensive, current skills designing large, highly-concurrent, distributed J2EE/ Database and n-tier systems
- Competent web developer, comfortable hand coding HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Currently learning new HTML5 features and enhancing understanding of object oriented JavaScript
- Build/ Infrastructure specialist - Years of experience designing automated build systems, designing and installing software/ infrastructure
- Skilled in Database design, PL/SQL, Stored Procedures, Oracle 9i, 10g, MySQL
- Newly developed mobile development skills in the Android API
- Experienced working with XML technologies (XPath, XSD), JSON and WebServices.
- Understands a wide range of other technologies: Puppet, OpenLDAP, Apache HTTPD, Tomcat, ColdFusion, WebSphere
- Comprehensive experience of many operating systems: Linux/ Unix, Windows Server and Desktop platforms
- Able to pick up new technologies quickly, learning them deeply and able to exploit them thoroughly
- Experience of leading both agile and traditional (Waterfall) development projects
- Confident (happiest) developing in a fully Test Driven Development (TDD) style, able to leverage TDD method to produce modular, flexible software
- Thinks in terms of components, services, APIs and the domain model when designing systems
- Gets deeply involved with the team, experienced in mentoring junior developers
- Writes clear, self documenting, thoroughly tested code
Education/ Certification:
- Sheffield Hallam University (2001 - 2005): BSc (Hons) Software Engineering: 1st Class honours
- Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP) v1.6 Certification (2010)
Industry Experience:
Rolled out to over 12,000 users across 53 countries the Compliance Portal suite facilitates both the personal trading of Deutsche Bank employees and the monitoring/ surveillance of such trade requests by compliance personnel.
Technologies include: Java, Spring v2, Hibernate v3, Apache CXF (JAX-WS), JBPM, Drools, FreeMarker, LDAP, JMS, JDBC, OO JavaScript, ExtJS
- Overall technical lead/ Architect, leading a team of 12 developers.
- Defined the overall architectural vision and technical design across several development phases seeing the system double in user capacity
- Gained a deep understanding of the client's existing enterprise architecture to ensure the most appropriate technologies were used throughout development
- Consistently delivered software releases on time against very aggressive project schedules
- Promoted a TDD approach across the team resulting in a significant increase in test coverage and code quality
- Lead the team through successful rewrites of several well known 'trouble' areas
- Designed a lightweight development process to give structure to a previously unpredictable development method
- Designed a build and release process, making releases more consistent and predictable
- Evangelised the use of automated time-tracking tools (JIRA) away from inefficient manual methods to increase team productivity
- Mentored junior developers
- Senior developer in a small agile team, practising Scrum
- Designed and set up project infrastructure: Hudson, Nexus Maven Repository, Maven project design
- Wrote a custom Maven MOJO enabling automatic creation, teardown and population of Database schemas
- Designed and implemented the core, settlement and reconciliation system logic
- Mentored junior developers, assisting in design and providing implementation guidance
- Involved in the design of the team development process
- Designed a distributed XML based message processing system, using Web Service endpoints (Metro) on Sun Application Server, Oracle AQ JMS Queues and genericjmsra resource adapter
- Managed development team; planned work packages; mentored and developed team members; managed and resolved developer’s implementation issues; reviewed submitted code
- Identified and resolved discrepancies in customer requirements during design phase resulting in corrections to functional specification prior to implementation phase
- Regularly consulted by senior architects on integration and performance issues in existing systems including the identification and resolution of a thread safety bug in a live environment
- Performed feasibility study on certain customer-mandated technology stack items, advised customer on findings resulting in subsequent improvements to technology choices
- Technical J2EE lead in a dynamic team of up to 30 developers, provided design and implementation guidance to developers
- Proactively identified areas in need of enhancement, proposed and implemented changes
- Designed and implemented Ant based automated build and release framework to reduce build time and increase deployment accuracy
- Wrote several utilities to identify and manage developer commit errors
- Designed and implemented 2 main use cases in a complex J2EE/ Oracle based application
- Designed, tested and rolled out team-wide automated platform uplift to new Java technology stack – this reduced dev platform install time from several days to a few minutes
- Nominated for STAR award for outstanding contribution to delivery
- Planned and managed work team output; remotely managed team members working in India
- Delivered a suite of automated tests for ACF Spine subsystem reducing test times and increasing test accuracy. Automated the testing of certain requirements previously deemed un-testable
- Managed ColdFusion, iPlanet and WebSphere hosting environments for 100+ intranet and 80+ internet sites. Administered internet access, proxy and routing systems for 15000+ web users throughout 17 countries, using NetCache devices and Proxy configuration scripts
- Nominated for Student of the year award
Personal Projects/ Open Source Contributions:
- shhbox - A location based messaging service. Helped design the main RESTful web service and currently designing the Android application.
- Dutch Barge Association tracker - A location tracking and logging tool for barge owners, allowing members to track and share their location with others. Currently designing and implementing the Android application.
- objx - Object oriented JavaScript enhancement library. Project Committer. Recently implemented new OGet functionality and unit tests.
Personal:
- Avid mountain biker, frequently take part in competitions including downhill and enduro races in the UK. Serial bike commuter - definitely the best way to travel around London!
- Writer and producer of electronic music. Winner of Lamb's 'Stronger' remix competition.
- Member of the London Java Community
More Information:
Please get in touch if you would like any more information