I am a professional PHP developer with a broad experience of web design and development. I currently live and work in Bristol, UK.
Ents24 is an entertainment listings website with over 1 million unique visitors per month. It is the third largest online ticket retailer in the UK [Hitwise 2009].
I am part of a small development team and therefore directly responsible for the full life-cycle of a wide variety of systems. These include the main website, mobile site, native mobile applications, site content management systems, feed importers, newsletter mailers and more.
In Spring/Summer 2009 I was responsible for the significant redesign of the navigation and overall feel of the site. Extensive thought and consultation went into encouraging deeper browsing while revealing the breadth of the content at a glance.
I regularly audit SEO performance across the whole site. We have conducted in-depth research and experimentation to establish the most significant factors in organic search rankings for our content.
We also regularly use A/B testing to establish the effect on our conversion rate when making changes to the site.
We have to manipulate large relational datasets in complex ways to produce well-formatted listings. This requires close attention to MySQL indexes, cache utilisation and other performance issues.
We had an unmanageable logging/analytics table with over 120 million rows. I redesigned the system using two tables respectively optimised for reading and writing, and used MySQL partitioning and other optimisations to ensure the archived data could be backed up and used efficiently for data-mining.
Ents24 had one of the first useable WAP sites in the UK. We recently re-wrote our mobile site to use XHTML-MP. The API developed behind this new site was also used to power a javascript web app interface for iPhone as well as a native iPhone app.
I was solely responsible for the iPhone web and native app development with design and UX input from others in the team. This involved learning Objective-C and the iPhone SDK.
We have recently developed a powerful internal system for targeting content across our sites and email campaigns. Targeting can be based on multi-dimensional user data including geography, sales information, and site activity.
Major challenges included designing a user interface that allows staff to harness the power of the system whilst remaining intuitive and quick to use. Careful optimisation of the processing was essential to allow us to send individually targeted emails to over 250 000 users with complex and unique targeting, in a timely and resource-efficient manner.
Before and during my University studies I completed many web development projects for a variety of clients.
I remain registered as self-employed, and continue to provide hosting and maintenance services for new and previous clients.
For many clients, I created bespoke content management solutions to fit specific data requirements. Many required an interface suitable for non-technical users.
Bespoke solutions included a full multi-user, multi-site CMS with multimedia handling capabilities.
Often a client's requirements and budget meant that deploying Open Source applications such as WordPress or Gallery2 was the best solution. This generally involved modifications or custom themes to meet the client's needs.
I often managed all aspects of a client's site including domain registration/transfer, DNS management and site/email hosting.
I have been involved with other projects outside of my professional work. I have contributed to and written modules for the Kohana Framework.
I am especially interested in Object Relational Mapping and have read widely on the subject, researching ORM implementations in Ruby and Python as well as the range of common options in PHP.
I am co-develping an ORM module for Kohana called Jelly which is working towards a stable release. I presented some of the advanced issues we wish to solve at the London Kohana Conference (May 2010).
The syllabus had a strong electronic engineering focus, but included modules on C and C++ programming, software development (computer science theory), and multimedia production including graphics, animation and HTML/CSS.
My individual final-year project was designing and making a loudspeaker monitoring system. This involved analog and digital circuit design, microprocessor programming including managing a full TCP/IP stack on a PIC, and GUI software (Java) for displaying transmitted measurements.
A grades in Maths, Physics and Music Technology at A2 level and Theology at AS level.
7 A* grades including Maths, Science and English, 4 A grades, and 1 B.
References available on request.