Experience

In 2022 I was formally promoted to Lead Developer at Aviva. I have been a lead in multiple teams during this role. I provide support to developers by performing activities such as gatekeeping pull requests and providing technical advice. I provide support to the business by performing activities such as high-level estimates, aiding backlog prioritisation and raising work-items. I work with architects to ensure their designs get implemented correctly. I assist in improving agile practices in the team. For example, I re-introduced planning poker back into the team. I attend regular meetings where we monitor the results of ongoing pen testing.

I have assisted with migrating code bases from .NET Framework to .NET(opens in a new window). I have also assisted with containerising those applications with Docker(opens in a new window). The company changed the entire dev ops pipeline for the containerised applications and I ran a presentation to multiple teams explaining the new approach.

During this role I predominantly worked on a greenfield project. The project used Akka.NET(opens in a new window), SignalR(opens in a new window) and React(opens in a new window). My existing knowledge of Akka.NET was very valuable to the team. I quickly provided value by improving the reliablility of the solution's unit tests.

One year into the role I became a tech lead, which gave me lead developer gatekeeping responsibilities. I also worked the role of lead developer on multiple projects. This involved raising stories, assisting with backlog prioritisation, gathering requirements, liaising with the business, assisting other developers in the team, gate-keeping pull requests, managing dev ops pipelines, doing production deployments and running scrum ceremonies when the scrum master was unavailable.

During this role I worked on various solutions built around Skype For Business. I helped the dev team build out release pipelines in VSTS and embrace TDD & testing automation. This involved a large mentality shift with regards to how QA was approached. We tried to involve our testers as early as possible with each user story. I particularly enjoyed embracing TDD.

I led the design of one project that involved the co-ordinating of over 50 machines. It used Akka.NET(opens in a new window) and SignalR(opens in a new window) to achieve the distributed computing required. The machines could be configured using an Angular2(opens in a new window) TypeScript(opens in a new window) web application. During this project we hired a junior dev whom I mentored which was an extremely rewarding experience. I was also stand-in scrum master for this project.

This was my first development role. I initially performed small support tasks and developed in-house .NET Framework solutions. I then moved on to developing enhancements and bug fixes to existing products. These systems were usually 3-tier ASP.NET Web Form Applications with T-SQL databases. I eventually began working on new projects and was the first person at the company to make a website using an ORM back-end (Entity Framework) and the MVC design pattern (ASP.NET MVC). My first project was for the large retail firm Sainsbury’s. I also began writing unit tests for the first time during my time at C A Design Services.