About

Work Experience

• Principal Software Engineer, CV-Library

  Oct, 2023 - Present

  As a Principal Software Engineer, my job is to produce and promote internal best practice standards and to serve as a buffer between the Architecture and Development teams, assisting with the system designs, implementing PoC applications, and guiding their eventual development and delivery.

  • I was responsible for the OpenTelemetry instrumentation of our Perl and PHP applications, a project I was an early advocate for. As part of this, I released the first Perl implementation of this specification as a FOSS library, which I maintain.

  • I was in charge of the migration of our deployment pipeline to Kubernetes using ArgoCD.

  • I implemented the migration of our object storage from a self-hosted solution to one hosted on AWS across our Perl and Go services

• Team Lead, CV-Library

  Aug, 2020 - Oct, 20233 years 1 month

  As a Development Team Lead I managed two different teams of developers working on the delivery of features across multiple languages and domains. During this time, I was in charge of the delivery of two large projects that became regular examples of success by management: a user-facing CV Builder, and the design of our internal search microservice.

  • I managed two separate teams of developers working on new features in different areas of the platform

  • I wrote a Perl agent for New Relic that we used to monitor our production code, and gave a talk about it at the Ephemeral Mini Conf

• Senior Developer, CV-Library

  Jul, 2020 - Aug, 20201 month

• Developer, CV-Library

  Dec, 2017 - Jun, 20202 years 6 months

  I worked as part of a team maintaining a large codebase composed of several interconnected services implemented in Perl, PHP, and Go.

  I was also personally responsible for the delivery of multiple projects including the design of a (now largely outdated) feature toggle API specification and the implementation in Go of a bot detection microservice that sat transparently in our message pipeline.

  • I became the maintainer of our Perl dependency tree, and was responsible for validating and delivering Perl upgrades to our platform. This taught me about the importance of supply-chain security and version auditing. I supervised three major and one minor language upgrades with no issues.

• Research Facilitator in Speech Technology, University of Sheffield

  Apr, 2016 - Dec, 20171 year 8 months

  The CloudCAST project aimed to allow researchers, developers, and clinicians to create tools that benefit from state-of-the-art developments in speech technologies. According to plan, when the platform was active, developers would be able to connect their applications to it and receive speech recognition using models trained on a per-user level.

  • As the sole developer, I was in charge of the design of the API that would handle both the management of user projects and the training and use of speech recognisers.

  • My job also included the implementation of the bridge between our applications and the underlying ASR library using Kaldi and GStreamer

Projects Experience

• OpenTelemetry for Perl

  Nov, 2022 - Present

  OpenTelemetry is an initiative by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to define a set of APIs and tools that can be used by libraries and applications to generate, collect, and export telemetry data that is vendor-agnostic.

  Since 2022 I’ve been working on a Perl implementation of this standard which is now in use in multiple production environments across a growing number of companies.

  • Presented at The London Perl Workshop 2024

  • Wrote an article about it in the Perl Advent Calendar 2024

  • Built on top of the experience of building a New Relic agent for Perl, presented at the Ephemeral Mini Conf

• PublicSuffix

  Jul, 2022 - Present

  An automatically-updated Raku library to query Mozilla's public suffix list

  • Changes to the upstream public suffix list are automatically checked daily, triggering a new release when needed

  • Presented at The Raku Conference 2022

• Cookie::Jar

  Jul, 2022 - Present

  A framework-independent Raku library to support HTTP cookie parsing and storage

  • Presented at The Raku Conference 2022

• Test2::Tools::DOM

  Mar, 2022 - Present

  A library to test HTML/XML-based DOM representations using Perl's Test2 framework

• Game::Entities

  May, 2021 - Present

  A dependency-free entity registry for use in Entity-Component-System designs

  • A port of EnTT, available for both Perl and Raku

  • Implemented using sparse sets for efficient storage of entity components

  • Presented at The Conference in the Cloud 2021

• Pop

  Mar, 2021 - Present

  An experimental 2D game engine for Raku, based on SDL2

• App::Lorea

  Nov, 2020 - Present

  A command-line utility to execute commands on filesystem changes

  • A Raku port of the reflex tool originally written in Go

• raku.land

  Nov, 2020 - Present

  A directory of Raku distributions, steadily becoming the de-facto place to browse for Raku code

  • Written in collaboration with James Raspass, entirely in Raku

  • Presented at The Raku Conference 2021

• HTTP::Tiny

  Oct, 2020 - Present

  A dependency-free HTTP 1.1 user agent library for Raku

  • A Raku port of the Perl library of the same name

  • Using only the standard library, it supports redirection, streaming requests and responses, multipart and URL-encoded form uploads, and correctly handles multipart responses to ranged requests

• Timer::Stopwatch

  Sep, 2020 - Present

  A Raku library to schedule and reset repeated time measurements

  • A Raku port of Go's time.Timer. Wrote an article about part of the development process

Skills

Education

Volunteer Work

Interests