Development
I have worked as a technical support engineer at a 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 (webhook signature calculation, supprting additional features), DNS (record sync, cloudserver nameserver comparisons) and notifications (preventing duplicates, preventing race conditions from affecting delivery) managed to include new tests in 42% of PRs.
My core responsibilities include
- Supporting customers with technical questions and system setup (DNS, firewalls, scheduled tasks etc.)
- Interpreting bug reports across PHP/Laravel and JavaScript codebases
- Monitoring errors and logs to get ahead of bug reports
- Breaking down large issues into manageable tasks
- Delivering long-lasting solutions via pull requests
- Suggesting and implementing improvements/features
- Writing automated tests
- 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 helped small, niche-industry service businesses by delivering a custom booking and review system using Stripe API (checkout, webhooks etc), Shopify store development, released a few open source laravel packages and created Wordle before it was cool!
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 proposals for aysnchronous review
- Building and testing solutions
- Digging through log files and error messages
- 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.