Development
I work as a developer & technical support engineer at a small, developer-focussed SaaS application that monitors site health across uptime, performance, DNS, SSL, broken links, scheduled tasks and more. So far it has performed over 12 billion checks and sent over 5 million notifications since launching and is now a critical part of agencies and software team tools.
During this time my changes have been merged in a number of different modules across the repository. This includes timezones (cron, uptime calculations), language/translations, API, DNS (record sync, cloudserver nameserver comparisons) and notifications delivery. I also managed to include new tests in 50% of PRs.
In addition to developing new features, enhancements and tackling bugs my core responsibilities include
- Supporting customers with technical questions and system setup (DNS, firewalls, scheduled tasks etc.)
- Maintaining open source repositories
- Develop internal tools for debugging, monitoring, reporting and testing
- Monitoring errors, logs and bug reports
- Delivering long-lasting solutions via pull requests
- Increase test code coverage
- Writing documentation and FAQs to help improve customer experience
- Handling user admin tasks such as billing, team management, system setup
- Being the first point of contact for sales
I have also worked in a cloud SaaS team on an enterprise automation platform where we managed multi-tenant customer environments on AWS infrastructure. My objective was to modernise the current stack, improve code quality/testability, consolidate internal databases and develop reporting tools to empower sales, support and infrastructure teams. Working with Jira for agile project management and performing code reviews for all pull-requests.
You can find out more about my role at Redwood software on my LinkedIn profile.
Finance Systems
As a finance systems and reporting development manager I was responsible for supporting and developing the ERP system with my team in a role positioned between IT and finance departments.
I have been involved in a number finance and ERP related projects working across departments and systems. This usually means spending time
- Gathering requirements
- Providing options and recommended approaches
- Writing and reviewing proposals
- Building and testing solutions
- Inspecting log files
- Translating conflicting business requirements into actionable tasks
- Breaking down technical concepts to non-technical people
- Making long-term decisions while considering timescales, other priorities and business objectives
- Navigating unexpected issues and calmly providing solutions/workaround
I did not always have access IT infrastructure, tools or privileges so being able to debug issues with restricted access required creativity and a real understanding of the problem by working closely affected users. It can be easy to throw code at a problem or automate processes without thinking of long term maintenance, impact on workflows or the humans at the other end. This resulted in using a mix of local code (e.g. VBA), low-code tools (MS Power Platform), smarter logging and changes to business processes.
You can find out more about my roles in finance systems on my LinkedIn profile.