Simon Ardrey

I started this role as a contractor then after the students from my intake at Coder Academy finished. I became full-time until I decided I need a bit of a break. I needed the flexibility and extra time to go travelling plus pursue some non-dev interests.

I contributed to a React.js SPA which featured management of IoT sensors and viewing of real-time dashboards in the web browser and TV-connected devices. I was able to leverage my React.js knowledge and understanding of coding best practices to improve standards. I was often tasked with code review, QA and occasional phone interviews with prospective developers.

At Buddy, I built extendable structured React component hierarchies and UI screens using well known React patterns such as HOC, function as child, render callback and more. I extensively used Redux and Redux-Saga to connect and integrate shared UI state while being mindful of its common pitfalls and traps.

This was a fun, creative and very social role. It was an opportunity to give back to the development community and a good break from full-time development. I was involved for one intake before moving back into web development.

I had to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails fast in order to help teach this course. In doing so I discovered that RoR is a great framework and I really enjoy using it. and the many libraries available such as Devise and CanCan

We also built some NodeJS apps using ExpressJS, PassportJS and Mongoose.

My days were mostly spent assisting students with their morning tutorials then answering questions and coaching in the afternoons.

I produced some content such as code, mini projects and tutorials. I gave some presentations and filled in when the lead teacher was away. I was also tasked with marking assignments.

The technology we focused on was Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, React.js, HTML and CSS, deployment with Heroku and testing.

Psychwire provided a social media platform for the mental health industry and now provides world-class online training courses through their own unique platform.

As a full stack developer and a key member of the team my responsibilities have been wide and varied. I have had to think on my feet and act quickly. Sometimes responding to late night scaling emergencies and system crashes.

Accomplishments:

• Introduced best practices to the team to improve structure.
• Provided UI component guidelines and boilerplate that facilitated UI standardisation.
• Introduced improved management tooling to the team.
• Solved crippling scaling and performance issues with our live feed by implementing caching in major bottlenecks. I reduced the number of database queries by around 80%.
• Migrated our database to an entirely new schema.
• Built ReactJS based admin tools, allowing customer support to perform operational tasks on their own.

Responsibilities:

• Development of core features and infrastructure code.
• Provide software/system architecture direction and implementation.
• Organise, prepare and articulate development tasks for developers.
• Perform code review and manage code quality.
• Manage the outsourcing of development work to offshore developers.
• Manage the merging of code and deployment/release cycle.
• Database management including migrations and refactoring.
• Data mining, reporting and business intelligence gathering.
• Recruitment and screening of new developers both in-house and offshore.
• Mentoring junior developers in best practices.

PHP and the Yii framework were the previous technologies I worked with. For the new RESTful APIs, I solely used NodeJS with HapiJS and Sequelize.

PHP Developer working in a small team on a multi-tenant SaaS application for the management of child care centres throughout Australia.

• Upgrading and building new UI screens/forms with the projects proprietary front-end JavaScript framework.
• Back-end development using the projects proprietary framework.
• Database refactoring and migrations with PostgreSQL and PropelORM
  
• Built large dynamic SQL queries for complex PDF report generation.

C# .NET 4 Developer for a computer monitoring product in a small team, writing add-on modules to monitor such things as MSN conversations, applications used, websites visited and also provide internet filtering based on a hosted blacklist.

One of the more complex modules I produced was an MSN packet sniffer based on WinPCap. This module would decode the MSN protocol and log conversations. This project required a lot of research into the inner workings of the Windows API and the TCP protocol.

Built a simple web backed in PHP for submitting the data collected. I built this using a custom MVC style framework and the Propel ORM.

I was a solo developer and the go-to I.T. guy for this organisation for many years.

Projects

• Paint estimation software for steel fabrication (VB6)
  
• Multi-user contact database with In/Out board, instant messaging (using Firebird events), simple debtor manager and time-sheet recording using a biometric fingerprint scanner. (C# .NET and WinForms, FirebirdSQL)
  
• Drawing Register - Logs Architectural, Engineering and Workshop drawings from clients and checks for discrepancies between the workshop's set of drawings and the client. (C#)