Continuous Integration

I have over five years practical experience working with Vagrant, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Python, Bash, Jenkins and Rundeck to develop and deliver industrial strength continuous integration scripts and automated testing (Behat, Cucumber, Gherkin, SimpleTest, PHP Unit, Selenium, Jmeter, apache benchmark) across multiple websites, countries and development environments.

Automation

I have broad experience with Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Vagrant, Docker, CloudFormation, AWS-Cli, Jenkins, Terraform, and Kubernetes.

Security

I have five years of experience in building applications and environments with security built in. Day to day duties have included mitigation against injection, broken authentication, sensitive data exposure, XML external entities (XXE), broken access control, security misconfiguration, cross-site scripting (XSS), insecure deserialization, using components with known vulnerabilities, insufficient logging and monitoring. I am very knowledgeable regards GDPR legislation and oWasp standards.

AWS

I have three years extensive experience developing using AWS (EC2, S3, Route 53, Loadbalancer, RDS, Cloud formation). This includes configuration, use of and extension of aws-cli.

DRUPAL

Drupal is clearly my specialism. I have twelve years of experience with DRUPAL 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 having used it for content management of a large number of sites that I have used to support a diverse range of web projects ranging from government websites to large community-driven charity sites. My knowledge includes creating modules for DRUPAL. I often contribute to the Drupal community – my username is CarlHinton where you will find I head up the group responsible for maintaining the Swahili version of Drupal and I have been involved in the Drupal 8 and 9 builds. I am responsible for the webform-classes module amongst others. I am a member of London Drupal meetup group and a member of the Drupal Association.

I have extensive experience of bespoke module building including the use of bespoke entities, field instances, webforms, views, panels, features, ckeditor widgets, behaviours, services (RESTful), simple-test, page manager, ctools, drush, patching and much much more.

I have successfully used coder, tough-love and fisheye / crucible to ensure code review and coding standards across the teams that I have managed.

I am familiar with many of the new technologies and their integration with Drupal 8; such as YAML, twig, and Symfony.

Team Leadership

As a Senior Developer I have often needed to take on a leadership role. My responsibilities have included code review, pairing, presentations, webcasts, and provision of training sessions, documentation, organising and chairing team meetings and forums, mentoring, people management, appraisals, hiring and firing, development of team tools, best practices and processes. I believe that I have provided guidance, instruction direction and leadership within many of the teams that I have worked in.

PHP

I have over 18 years continuous practical experience in this area. Clearly Drupal is my specialism; however, I have worked with WordPress, Magento, Symfony, Moodle, x-cart, Laravel, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, and Zend

MySQL & Linux Experience

I have over 17 years continuous practical experience in using  a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. Examples include prototyping of the Goldfish card platform (1.9 million card-holder accounts) using MS-Access, then conversion of this prototype to mySQL, design of multi-tier through to web interface, including server balancing.

I have extensive additional multi-tier database experience, in particular use of LAMP,  and CITRIX. One example is the Barclaycard Partridge database. I was responsible for the requirements gathering, designing, coding and implementing of this database. The database is used over international boundaries, holding 1.7 million secure customer accounts. Completed within a timescale of two months, Partridge now has in excess of 5,000 concurrent users. Others examples include the on-line banking systems for Argos, Sky, House of Fraser and Thomas Cook each system having in excess of a million users.

Developing and Implementing Systems

I have practical experience of all stages of the software development lifecycle. I have incepted and developed complex RESTful APIs for Government systems through to delivery of end user training.  I designed, prototyped and wrote code (Visual BASIC and C++) for the Barclays Connect transactions database this is still in use with 50 concurrent front line users. I believe that this demonstrates the robustness of my design. I am the creator of an on-line Artificial Intelligent distributed databases for the CBM (an international charity organisation). The requirements for this database have been changing almost daily since its inception. The easy maintainability of this system is demonstrable from its continued existence.

I have delivered classroom systems training to the DVLA, courts and tribunals judiciary and law enforcement agencies.

Analytical Skills

I have worked both alone and as part of teams of professional change analysts for over twelve years, using ISEB, Prince 2 and Agile Volere structured methodologies to identify and deliver enhancements and improvements across both public and private sector organisations.

Examples of my Analytical skills include:

  • Drupal project management
  • Large organisation change management working across Barclays Bank
  • ISEB Analysis techniques for Skycard and Providian
  • Prince 2 Project management techniques used for many years across many projects in both Barclaycard and Barclays Bank
  • Financial trend analysis for five years in Barclaycard Terminal Operations

Programming Numerical Algorithms / Module Construction

I have extensive knowledge of programming numeric algorithms, particularly in the Drupal environment. For the Barclays Controls Review it became necessary to develop a group of neural network, artificial intelligence functions within this environment which could readily be describes as a programming language in its own right

Interface Design

I am familiar with Human Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques for making user friendly GUIs, and all of the systems mentioned above included requirements for the disabled and non-English speaking users. In addition I used HCI with Ie (subsidiary of TSYS) in the development of the Apple credit card website.

Working corroboratively and on own

I am experienced in working in a collegiate manner as well as being self directed when appropriate.

Collaborative Projects:

  • Design and Development of Requirements Definition for Sky
  • Requirements gathering for systems for Thomas Cook and Argos
  • Systems use cases (ISEB)
  • User Acceptance Testing, Test strategies, scripts and scenarios
  • End user, Business Owner, and Process Owner Interview

Personal Projects:

  • Organisational structure redesign
  • Scenario Modelling
  • Benefits planning / Business cases for multiple Barclaycard projects
  • I have been self-managed for over 20 years

Project Management

I am familiar with Agile, Lean and waterfall project methodologies. Scrum master, stories, sprints, estimating and planning.

Solution Architecture
I am expert in Solution Architecture with broad experience of Systems Architecture and Project Delivery across multiple Architectures including infrastructure, varied applications, and Business Intelligence. I architected and coded the Barclays bank Zachman Framework process mapping system. 

Serverless

I have developed fully serverless AWS Lambda applications using node.js, S3 buckets and Amazon Aurora Serverless on-demand, auto-scaling MySQL databases.