Contact details:

Personal information:

Education (age 11+):

Qualifications:

Degree:

Bachelor of Science degree with Honours in Computer Science: Second Class, Division I.

School/College:

Current position:

I am currently working within UK IDN Core Development at Reuters as a Programmer/Application Leader. I have been with Reuters since April 2001, and have been in the role of Application Leader since July 2003.

Owing to the terms of my contract, I cannot provide details of the ystems I work on, other than give an outline of the technologies involved. Much of my work has been development work under Compaq (now HP) OpenVMS 7.x on the Compaq Alpha architecture (such as the AlphaServer ES40) for Real Time systems on the high-availability Reuters Integrated Data Network (IDN). Languages used are primarily Compaq Pascal, C/C++, Compaq Ada '83, Digital Command Language (DCL). This work has allowed me to become proficient in developing for the OpenVMS platform including the use of system services. I am now comfortable on the OpenVMS platform, using DECnet, MMS & CMS for development, Autogen and other system applications as well as the languages stated above.

In addition to development under VMS on the Alpha architecture, I have also been involved in the continuing development and support of an application written in Java utilising JDBC allowing an OS/390 based application on an IBM mainframe connect to and run queries on an Oracle database, and also receive update notifications from it using in-house developed software based on Tibco Rendezvous. This application runs under Solaris 8 on the Sparc architecture. Configuration management was conducted using CVS and builds with GNU make.

I have also gained a good understanding of the financial markets and exchanges, and certain Reuters products such as the Reuters Terminal & 3000Xtra which utilise the services provided by systems I have been involved in developing & supporting.

Previous position:

I worked from August 2000 to April 2001 at Bell eBusiness Ltd as a Systems Developer also performing Systems Administration duties.

The systems administration function of job involved keeping our 100Mbit LAN consisting of mainly PCs/Macs running Debian/GNU Linux (with some PCs running Windows NT Server v4), and the Bell Design OpenBSD-based router running smoothly. Amongst the admin tasks come configuration of the Apache web server, email system (based on Cyrus IMAP) for both companies, the setting up of development environments, backup/archival, maintaining the bug-tracking system I set up (based on Bugzilla), etc. The bulk of my work was development rather than systems administration (>95%).

The development side of my job presented an interesting and varied selection of challenges. Most of my work was 'back-end' so involved a lot of Perl/C++/PL/SQL development, in conjunction with databases such as MySQL and Oracle 8i. Early on I did a considerable amount of work on Mozilla's Transformiix XSLT processor, most of this was feature enhancements (e.g. adding network URI support using the Common C++ Sockets class) and bug fixing (all in C++ under Linux). Many of our client sites are based on XML/XSLT and I've gained experience in both of these using first the Transformiix and later Sablotron XSLT processors. At the same time as developing my XML/XSLT, I also gained experience in ModPerl development under Apache.

The main project I was involved in consisted of developing a set of administration tools for a large database driven website using Oracle 8i and Oracle Forms Developer/Server 6i. This has expanded my knowledge of Oracle, and PL/SQL (the tools have required many triggers and stored procedures to be written) immensely.

The overview given is only a brief snapshot of those few months. Much of my work involved using a range of often very new technology still in development (Transformiix for instance). An ability to provide effective solutions whilst adapting to new technology has proved useful.

Most of the work has been on newissues.com (sadly not launched), but I have also worked on an admin system for the DETR Child Road Safety campaign (Perl using DBI/DBD::MySQL), the ISA Shop (old site - literature request) and provided tech. support for e-gasandpower.com (old site) for a period.

Affiliations:

I am a professional member of the British Computer Society, with the intention of eventually gaining chartered status (CITP). I am also a member of the International High IQ Society and a member of the UK Chapter of HP CUO (formerly DECUS UK).

Past projects:

For my final year dissertation, I worked on the development of an on-line financial service for the ISA Shop; the aim of the service being to allow investors to research and eventually place investments on-line (for ISAs, With-Profits Bonds, etc.). The research facilities were fully implemented in conjunction Bell Design & Communications Ltd. The project went on to look at the development of a more advanced service which would be data driven to ensure it was always up to date and to allow illustrations to be requested on-line. On the academic side of the project, observations were made as to the design process and how formally specifying web applications can be done (using the Unified Modelling Language and the newly developed Web Application Extensions) and how helpful and practical this is. This turned out to be a thoroughly interesting project that I could easily have done beyond the allocated 9 or so months!

Over the summer vacation, I worked on a 13-week placement at The University of Manchester's, Visualization Centre. The work carried out here was largely looking at ports of multi-threaded C code to Java, the principle focus of this being a Fredholm Integral Equation solver produced by Sun Microsystems. The project was very much of a research nature with timings being taken on high powered machines such as a 40 CPU Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 and a 22 CPU Sun E6500 machine. This work was useful not only to determine acceptable methods of porting MT C code to Java but also to see how effectively Java performs on such high-end machines as well as PCs. Development was carried out mainly under IRIX 6.2/6.5, SunOs 5.7, Linux (2.0.35), with some under Windows NT 4. I also investigated the porting of C code written using the Solaris libthread threading library to POSIX threads, and part of this work involved going through teaching materials and noting corrections required to ensure they were relevant for teaching POSIX threads. My enjoyment of technical work made this a very fulfilling period of my career so far! :)

At the University of Nottingham, all second year Computer Science students take part in a group project module which lasts for the entire year. Students are picked and placed into groups with a supervisor, and will then proceed to produce a piece of software as directed by the supervisor. I was group leader and lead programmer for the project: "the connected world of Frank Ramsey", which involved the development of a web-based game, based on Ramsey theory and Erdos numbers. The object of the game is to find a successful dinner party involving the actor Kevin Bacon and three other actors (for the purposes of the game a successful dinner party is an unsuccessful Ramsey party for R(3,3;2)). The project was very much multi-faceted with development work in PERL, HTML and Java for the game and it's interface, whilst using C to ensure an efficient actor list generation program that was fast enough to generate the large amounts of data used for the game in a reasonable length of time. My role on the development side of the project was primarily to meet the need for the development of efficient underlying code, which has involved the development of an actor list generation program that uses the AMD (Alternative Movies Database), to generate lists of actors connected to a given actor by co-starring relationships. Part of my role as group leader/lead programmer was to advise the group on technical issues and assist in coding when members got stuck, this required me to have good all-round knowledge of all languages used.

Programming experience:

As well as being an essential part of my degree, I also enjoy programming as a recreational activity, and have been programming since 1989. My first efforts involved using a BASIC interpreter on a home computer, before I moved onto Turbo Pascal, then C/C++. I contributed one or two of my early BASIC programs to the Tyne and Wear Atari User Group, and had them published in their newsletter (I later learned that one of my contributions, a file copying utility, was in regular use by the group). At university I considerably developed my skills in both C and C++, and have also gained experience in other languages such as Java, and Perl. Recently, I have been using Pascal and Java extensively at work (differnt projects). I also have a lot of experience of programming in the UNIX shell, gained both at Nottingham and in a work setting since. Whilst at Nottingham I gained very good experience in text processing systems such as LaTeX and troff which are used by certain courses within the degree, for instance my dissertation was typeset using LaTeX. I particularly like the excellent results that can be achieved in LaTeX very quickly. Also I have had a long standing interest in the Internet since I first used it (1995) and have recently through my second and third year projects developed Web based applications developing my skills in that area. This is something that I enjoy and is an area of my development I expect to continue. The links below will give access to a couple of different things developed over the course of my time at Nottingham:

One may also be interested in looking at the group report for the group project which documents the work carried out for the second year project and contains the complete set of program code listings. Additionally, my final year dissertation and accompanying erratum are available for viewing. Finally, the research notes that formed a rough report to my supervisor for my summer work are also available.

Extra-curricular activities:

Whilst at Burnage High School, I was head computer 'monitor' for the last two years of my time there. This was a position of trust, which involved helping students and teachers to use the computers (a network consisting of Apple Macs) during lunchtimes and after school, as well as performing other tasks such as installing software, and ensuring that all the software and peripherals were functioning correctly.

Also whilst I was at Burnage, I was one of the top four pupils that were chosen to attend a 2-day introductory microprocessing course at UMIST. The course was an interesting and enjoyable insight into what life at university might be like, and served to strengthen my will to get to university.

I have also acted as a prefect on many occasions both at secondary school and then at sixth form college. This mainly took the form of showing parents and students round on open/taster days. I helped out on all of the taster days at college, and was very pleased to receive an award for my contribution to college life as a result.

Hobbies/interests:

My main area of interest is computers, particularly programming. I am also interested in electronics, and enjoy assembling circuits, either of my own design or as described in a magazine. In the past I have often combined my two interests to produce computer controlled devices, that would be connected to either the serial or joystick port of my home computer, and controlled by a BASIC program. I also enjoy upgrading and building PC's, and have performed many different upgrades from CPUs through to expansion cards, hard drives, motherboards and memory. I have constructed my own PCs and have set up and maintained networks of Windows/Linux based PCs on a small scale (at home). I am also beginning to dabble with VMS at home too, having obatined an old VAXStation and a hobbyist license for OpenVMS-Vax.

Apart from computers, I am interested in politics and history. One will notice that whilst at sixth form college, I took a course in European Studies, which I thoroughly enjoyed. As part of the course, students were required to produce a report on the European Union from a list of topics. I opted to produce a report looking at the environment in the EU and in Manchester. The report received considerable praise from the course tutor and other members of staff, and is available for download here.

References:

References are available on request.