I started a B.Sc. Computer Science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch but only completed a year before deciding that I wanted to try something else.

My first experience with University hadn't been quite what I wanted so I took some time out to explore my options a bit more. Not being qualified and having no money I saved up just enough for a flight to the UK and spent the year there working in pubs and travelling around Europe when I could. A great time in my life but enough to convince me that returning to University and completing my degree was what I wanted to do.

On returning to NZ I completed my B.Sc. Computer Science at the University of Otago in Dunedin.

Wood Delivery Management System was a Java Swing based application for Carter Holt Harvey Forests. This system had already been developed when I joined ECONZ but there were ongoing improvements being made to it that I was involved with as well providing support.

The Management System was a Java Swing based application that enabled Downers to sent jobs to technicians in the field. This was a new project and the first that I was properly involved in the development of.

The Management System was a Java Swing based application that enabled Downers to sent jobs to technicians in the field. This system had already been developed when I joined ECONZ and I was involved primarily in a support role.

Mobile job management system with a web management front end. This was ECONZ's foray into providing their own service and was aimed at the SME market. It allowed small companies to send jobs to employees out in the field who were using a J2ME applications on their phones to record progress.

Mobile timecard system with a web management system. Almost a simplified version of EService, TimeCard allowed employees to record when they were on the clock using a simple J2ME application on the phone. The web application provided reports and management tools based on the statistics that were recorded.

After three years at ECONZ I wanted to see a bit more of the world. My sister convinced me to volunteer planting trees in the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador for a couple of months after which I travelled North through Central America before flying on to the UK from Mexico.

A simple translation tool that was made available via Java Web Start and then modified an existing Swing application for the company's needs.

While waiting for a project I filled up my time working on internal Conexus projects and reading the ATG documentation. It wasn't a particularly motivating or stimulating period. The projects included moving the Conexus website from a Windows environment to CentOS and a DB2 database and adding administrative functionality to the website.

My first official ATG project involved creating Reserve & Collect orders and sending email notifications to the stores and users when placed.

This was an ATG B2B (Business to Business) eCommerce project. The role involved working from an FRS and designing and implementing solutions to meet those requirements. This included close contact with the business for clarifications and changes to the requirements. It involved significant changes to the approval pipeline to support the approval chain that the business required.

Figleaves was my first project as an independent contractor and I worked on the design and implementation of the User Profile and Search functionality of the new site.

SDG were re-platforming to ATG and I was brought in by Spindrift as an ATG developer to work on the project. The areas I was involved in were primarily working on the precursor to Site Builder, integrating the Endeca search engine and Coremetrics Analytics.

The first version of Site Builder was created by a core team of three developers. In just over a month we took a bunch of ideas from previous projects and created a product that was successfully delivered to Tesco.

Three months overlanding through Africa from Cape Town up to Uganda and Rwanda. Awesome time.

Based in Utrecht, version 2.0 was a considerable investment by Spindrift that introduced a lot of new functionality. I was again responsible for the design and implementation of multiple aspects of the product.

Three months through South East Asia covering Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and the Phillipines.

Created a new Site Builder Tracking module for Tesco, as well as working on new functionality for Site Builder 2.2.

Few weeks seeing a bit more of Europe.

The UX project was a rewrite of the front end application that had been created by a third party for the Tesco re-platform, to make better use of Site Builder and the functionality it offered. This was a short and sweet project run in conjunction with LBi to get a modern web application ready for release.

Spindrift’s first engagement with ECI was a piece of work to develop an ETL solution to improve the import of the product catalog from IBM WPC into ATG. This involved customisations to make the catalog read only in the BCC, a BCC application to manage the imports from WPC and an ETL solution to transform and import the WPC into the ATG Product Catalog Repository.

This involved updating the product to work with ATG 10 - which introduced ATG multisite - as well as having a chance to improve the core product and add new functionality.

I worked on developing functionality for the open source SolarNetwork framework. I created an HTML5 front end for the ADR that used a JSON interface to communicate with the SolarNetwork back end. The framework used was Spring and the logic was mainly implemented in JavaScript using jQuery.

Worked on a PoC for DTAG using SiteBuilder and ATG.

After five years I decided to check out NZ a bit more. This would end up in me moving back to NZ for over a year but still working remotely for Spindrift in the UK.

Momentum is an ATG accelerator that Spindrift has put together based on years of client solutions and sitting on top of Site Builder. It's involved extensions to Spindrift Site Builder as well the development of the core product. I've been responsible for the design and implementation of numerous aspects of the product including: the Endeca integration, data management, Spindrift Site Builder block library extensions.

Working remotely became too much for me as I felt as I was loosing contact with the project and my colleagues. So I made the decision to head back to the UK, taking the opportunity to check out the Trans Mongolian and Ireland on the way back.

The ECI platform refresh was the first client project to make use of Momentum and a lot of the product was developed in tandem with the project. Almost all my time on this project was spent developing the Momentum platform and ensuring that it was kept generic for use on other projects in the future.

I hit my limit for eCommerce projects and have decided to take some time out to travel and give myself to try out some other opportunities. I made it to Japan, had a two month road trip with a mate around Scandinavia then a bit of Cornwall, Canary Islands, Morocco and lastly a hike along the Rota Vicentina in Portugal.

I joined this project to create Canon Europe’s eCommerce platform using Spindrift Momentum and Oracle Commerce during the discovery phase, where I was involved in assessing their existing capability and how it would fit into the ATG platform. Being the key developer of Spindrift Site Builder my first task was to customise the JSPs and blocks to work with the Canon customised Build Kit and extend the data model to support the Canon requirements. During this phase I worked primarily with the BAs to understand the requirements and with the UX team to refine the HTML and JavaScript to fit into the Site Builder assembled JSPs. I worked on a number of integrations while at Canon including: Canon eCRM: integrating Canon’s user management system by extending the form handlers to interact with the RESTful API provided by Canon. SDL Translations: building a BCC application that used a RESTful interface supplied by SDL to send ATG Repository content (including Product Catalog and Site Builder content) to SDL for translation, then importing the results into a BCC project where they could be reviewed then deployed using the ATG workflow to the staging and product systems.

A month in Cuba and Belize before hiking to Everest Base Camp in Nepal then a couple of months through India.

I worked on a number of integrations while back at Canon including: PIM: adding extensions to the data import platform I’d developed in Spindrift Momentum to import the product catalog from the PIM platform that Canon selected. eBay: development of a framework using Apache Camel to integrate with the eBay product feed.

Two months travelling across North America before a three week trip to the Falklands, South Georgia Islands and Antartica then NZ for Xmas.

Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera

AWS Certified Developer - Associate

A few weeks up Australias East Coast betwen certifications.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

Small project working on a RFP for integrating Momentum with Canons CMS.

Work on getting Site Builder 3.6 and 4.0 ready for release.

Upgraded the Kingfisher code base (including Tradepoint and B&Q) from Site Builder 2 to Site Builder 3.5.

Fun trip from Rio in Brazil to Lima in Peru.

Some small pieces of work including updating the development environment and working on node plugins for a CSI KTL inverter and a battery pack.

Travelling around South East Asia (Myanmar, Borneo) while waiting for the Ecogy Energy project to kick off.

Deeplearning.ai certifications

Designing and developing an Asset Management platform for Ecogy Energy that utilises SolarNetwork and other third party servives. It's built entirely on AWS with a ReactJS SPA talking to an API deployed using API Gateway backed by Lambda functions that interact with third party services and other AWS products.