My Skills & Experience

Back-end web development can be summarised as: everything a website does, other than drawing a webpage. Concerns include managing the site's data, user login and signup, access permissions, and any custom logic, tasks or integrations.

I have over five years of experience using Python's Django web framework to create systems that perform:

• Content management
• Automated reporting
• Web scraping and post-processing
• 3rd party API integrations
• eCommerce

I can create attractive, interactive websites for both desktop and mobile. I get the best results when working closely with designers. I aim to choose the simplest tools possible for a given job, but when necessary I use JavaScript, jQuery, htmx and React to create the required user experience.

Web systems run on servers in "the cloud", or more accurately, on someone else's computer in a big warehouse. Provisioning, configuring and maintaining these servers can be key a sticking point in web development. I believe that getting infrastructure management and deployments "right" is a huge multiplier for both the speed and quality of software delivery.

I have years of experience setting up and running:

• Linux web servers and databases
• AWS tools and services (EC2, ECS, S3, RDS, etc)
• Docker-based workflows
• Configuration management (Ansible, Packer)
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform)
• Continuous integration (Jenkins, Buildkite, GitHub Actions)
• Single-button click deployments

I am a volunteer at Anika Legal, where I help the organisation achieve its mission of 'access to justice for everybody' by building software products and providing technical advice.

At Anika, I am responsible for our technical strategy: ensuring that we have the capabilities required to reach our organisation's goals. We currently support a public website, client intake questionnaire and automated reporting. We are in the process of building a custom, in-house case management system to replace our current vendor.

At Monash Univeristy I worked with a team of epidemiologists, mathematicians and data scientists to model COVID-19 and tuberculosis in Asia and Oceania. I took primary responsibility for the software (Python, NumPy, Pandas) and digital infrastructure (AWS EC2, S3). I assisted the team in refactoring, testing and publishing the core of their disease modelling framework as a publicly available Python library.

I automated the team's modelling workflow, replacing manual steps, with scripts orchestrated by a Buildkite agent. Steps of the workflow that were fully automated include:

• Starting and destroying transient AWS EC2 instances to run our code
• Setting up runtime environments with Packer-baked AMIs
• Downloading input data, creating plots, uploading outputs to AWS S3
• Running model calibrations and post-processing tasks
• Automatically re-building a static NextJS website to display the results of model calibrations

Contracted at the Future Fund (Australia's sovereign wealth fund) via Eliiza on a fixed-term 3 month contract. I assisted the DevOps team with maintaining and enhancing their CI/CD system for Python and .NET applications, deployed to self-hosted infrastructure.

I was the sole front end developer (ReactJS) for this insurance start-up for a fixed-term period. Upon starting, I quickly cleared out the backlog to enable the first release in several months. After that, I sped up the release cycle to allow weekly releases by assisting the business in breaking work into small valuable chunks. I collaborated with the backend team to coordinate API specs and synchronise releases.

I worked in a small team to support an online content marketing platform. I migrated several of the company's legacy WordPress websites, including thousands of articles and images, to a new bespoke Wagtail CMS. I built a publishing interface for our writing team, and an automated reporting tool for our hundreds of clients. I also worked on a React frontend for internal tools, our Django backend, our AWS infrastructure and our analytics setup.

I worked on the development team, which is responsible for the Kogan.com website. I worked across the full stack: front end with ReactJS, back-end with Django (Python) and our DevOps practices (AWS, Saltstack, Jenkins). In addition to my technical work, I also regularly communicated with stakeholders in marketing and operations to ensure that I shipped code that met the business' needs.

As a developer I worked on eNett's online-payment web service platform. There I worked with C#/.NET, SQL Server and PowerShell. I did firefighting in the production support team and worked on several projects.

I contributed to the team's DevOps practices, including our configuration managment (PowerShell DSC) and continuous integration pipeline (Jenkins). I made a significant effort to improve the team's documentation of software architecture and business logic.