Andrew Eells dot com

2.4 million UK business records with 10,000 visitors and 1,000 reviews daily as of Jul ‘08, BView is a high volume, scaled architecture website aiming to disrupt the UK local search market. Technical Team Lead from project inception, responsible for the following:

• proposal to Board members to design and adopt an Agile development process (predominantly XP, including continuous build and integration, TDD, high test case coverage, automated code feedback)
• initial technology evaluation and selection
• recruitment of a team of 7 direct reports including 4 Java / web developers
• daily ‘hands-on’ technical guidance to team members, including guiding daily ‘stand-up’ meetings
• significant contribution to product development and liaison with business partners to turn high-level concepts into a functioning user-friendly product
• continual feedback on development estimates, schedules and prioritisation of business deliverables
• external data provider liaison (Equifax, Ordnance Survey), data mining, extraction and reporting
• all database design and modeling, including performance considerations and refactoring as requirements increase
• all productionisation, build and release procedures
• hardware and hosting environment investigation and selection
• overall architectural responsibility for all technical design and coding

Main technical contributions included:

• development of bulk data import and processing of 5 million UK business and 26 million UK address records using Apache Ant, SQL Loader, Perl and UNIX shell scripting, PL/SQL scripting and advanced Oracle import techniques
• design and build of a high availability / response full-text search engine (stemming, sound-alike etc) utilizing Apache Lucene and Oracle Text search tools whilst making use of database denormalisation techniques for optimum read performance. Performance tested up to 2000 concurrent requests all served within 50ms
• in-depth investigation into Oracle Text capabilities including index synchronization and optimization, and confirmation of the way the Oracle CBO considers an Oracle Text index versus a more conventional B*Tree index
• design and development of Spring AOP Pointcut components to allow authentication upon interception of secured (annotated) controller URLs. Additional persistence of any HTTP form data submitted during interception, login over HTTPS, automated rebuild and submission of form payload upon successful authentication
• persistence layer design and implementation using Hibernate ORM framework, annotated lazy-loading / fetching strategy implementation
• business-logic controller framework development utilizing Spring framework and dependency injection, catering to both standard server-side and AJAX client requests
• various Spring framework utility classes to aid configuration, including: automated SessionFactory injection using BeanPostProcessor; automated Controller URL mapping
• sustained focus on client performance considerations including making fewer HTTP requests, Amazon S3 integration, Apache Expires Header and ETag manipulation, GZIPing components, JavaScript and CSS build minification etc.
• database schema design enabling synchronous development, integration, staging and production environments and an automated database patch / rollback release framework implementation (UNIX shell, PL/SQL scripts) allowing clean installation or continual integration

1 million existing UK business customers receiving 1,000 insurance quotes daily as of Jan ‘07, Xbridge is the UK’s leading online commercial insurance broker. As a Senior Java Developer, some of my major contributions included:

• working closely with the Architect and the Systems Manager as part of a Database Taskforce Team, increasing clarity and scalability of the Oracle database (schema normalisation refactoring, performance enhancements, data integrity, migration etc) utilising SQL, PL/SQL scripts, SQL Loader, Import / Export utilities, index performance analysis with SQL Trace and TKPROF
• introduction of JAAS plug-in security module once application ported to Tomcat container, enabling user authentication against different database schemas
• sole design, build and test of a lead-tracking web application rolled out to numerous providers including Lloyds, Natwest, London Scottish using Apache Struts, JAAS, Hibernate DAO pattern
• investigation and standardisation of legacy reporting framework. Volunteered so as to improve UNIX skills. Introduced proper release procedure after introduction of build scripts and QA environment as there was a huge emphasis placed on reliability by business teams
• driving cultural change within an inexperienced team from a purely release-date driven environment to a more mature approach involving industry standards and procedures, including introduction of code review process before release to QA environment, standardisation of DAO framework implementations and port to Hibernate persistence layer, introduction of monthly J2EE Patterns presentations to junior developers

Virtue Fusion - J2EE Developer | Nov ‘02 - Sep ‘04

Prudential, Egg - J2EE Developer | Feb ‘00 - Oct ‘02

Prudential - Graduate Trainee | Jul ‘99 - Jan ‘00

Mainframe Programmer - SAS, JCL

Education

University of Bath | Oct ‘94 - Jul ‘97

Bishop Wordsworth’s Grammar School, Salisbury | Oct ‘87 - Jul ‘94

References