Resume
I’m driven by curiosity and a need to know how things work. I enjoy finding patterns, whether they be in music, mathematics, language, or elsewhere. I don’t think there’s anything more valuable than a desire to learn, and second to this is a desire to teach. I’d rather put effort into automating something than doing the thing itself, and similarly, I enjoy making something work well more than just making it work. I read all sorts of things. I write music, and have formed or been a member of bands that have played around Australia. I have hiked in the Himalayas and the Madagascan jungles, and lived abroad in Norrköping, Sweden.
Education
I completed the following degrees at Swinburne University of Technology (Hawthorn, Australia). One semester was completed at Linköping University (Linköping, Sweden)
- Bachelor of Engineering (Robotics and Mechatronics)
- Bachelor of Science (Computer Science and Software Engineering)
Experience
SalesPreso
2012—, Technical Director
At SalesPreso, I design and manage a scalable, highly–available and standards–compliant HTTP API which drives our products.
Next Studio
2007—2012, Web Development
- Specified, designed and built a security–sensitive document tracking service with recurring payment processing and multiple user tiers.
- Responsible for moving integration, staging, and many production sites from internal or VPS hardware to Amazon EC2 instances.
- Championed adoption of issue tracking, continuous integration, more thorough project and code documentation, and responsiveness improvements through profiling and optimisation of HTML content and HTTP responses.
- Responsible for a complete functional and visual overhaul of standard CMS and Auth tools deployed with all company projects, including the addition of a fine–grained and flexible ACL–based authorisation system.
- Completed a full respecification and build of the company website, including CMS features to ensure it remains strictly XHTML+RDFa compliant.
- Experience with the full spectrum of small business operation, including quoting, specification, scheduling, client and project management, etc.
Zi–Argus
2006—2007, Industrial Automation and Control
- Rewrote software controlling a multi–vat acid bath system, including collision avoidance and planning for a pair of overhead cranes, and a software interface which would visualise vat conflicts and allow timing offsets when scheduling a new sequence. My work here was projected to save the client $30,000 every year.
- Wrote software for a major Australian retailer which queried logistics databases to manage pallet facilities in a warehouse. This single–site software was flexible enough to subsequently be deployed to multiple sites.
- Responsible for purchasing, configuring and providing support for a company–wide automated full–disk backup system.
Textor Textiles
2003—2005, Synthetic Textile Manufactury
- Helped specify and manage the deployment of SCADA systems to monitor factory equipment, along with fibre–optic networking to overcome interference issues in the existing factory electrical network.
- Created documentation and electrical diagrams for power distribution equipment throughout the factory.
Skills
I am a skilled Python developer with full confidence in the languages and concepts used on the modern web. I can speak PHP fluently, Java competently, and enjoy working with functional languages such as Haskell. I administer many Linux machines (both virtual and actual computers), and am completely at home in a command–line environment.
For a list of technology-related acronyms, please see my LinkedIn profile. For code samples, see my GitHub account.
Ben