Hello, I’m Will
I’m a software engineer based in the middle of rural Dorset (UK) 🚜🌾🌿
I’ve worked remotely for a couple of years now 💻⚡
I live in a house made of mud (fancily called ‘cob’) without any central heating. 🛖🔥
Links
CV
- If you want to grab a
pdf
CV, you can grab one here.
September 2021 - Present. Golang
River Island is a leading UK High Street fashion retailer
- I work closely with technical architects, software engineers and business stakeholders to integrate the business with our new warehouse provider
- Keystone project that will improve our logistical efficiency and growth potential
- Management role to align the team’s technical direction with our business objectives
August 2020 - September 2021 (1 year). Golang
- Transformed and exported key data streams to new wholesale partners, expanding an important part of the business
- We used simple serverless architecture (AWS Lambdas and SQS with Golang)
April 2020 - July 2020 (4 months). Golang
SMC builds hardware for radio and online communication
- Added new features to improve long-term hardware sales:
- Enabled third-party developers to interface directly with our main application (this included a client library)
- Created and integrated a microservice to send push-notifications
- Dockerised our main codebase and gave it a CI pipeline
Ratio - Software Engineer
June 2019 - March 2020 (10 months). Golang / Node / PHP
Ratio is a Fintech software company - products include a loan search engine.
- Led several projects end-to-end including:
- Automated complex reporting processes, saving 2 engineer-hours/day
- Created reusable domain models, greatly simplifying development workflow
- Improved how a central model was accessed and stored, allowing the business team to be more efficient
- Mentored junior engineers
Deliveroo - Software Engineer
November 2016 - May 2019 (2½ years). Ruby / Golang
Deliveroo sells and delivers restaurant meals.
- I was part of the Customer Experience team: total focus on the customer
- Routinely led features end-to-end: definition, development and release
- Launched several successful products:
- Order Tracker - customers can view order progress
- Self-help flow - customers can claim compensation and find help
- Led the company-wide movement to start deprecating old apps, reducing our maintenance burden and improving the order rate
- Collaborated with other teams to improve our data pipeline
Snaptrip - Backend Software Engineer
October 2014 - November 2016 (2 years). Ruby / Rails
Snaptrip is a marketplace for last-minute holiday cottages.
- We were a scrappy startup and I got stuck in everywhere
Personal projects I’ve had fun making
Technical interests
- Functional programming / Haskell
- Linux / Shell scripting
- Kubernetes / Docker / Devops
Before I got into Software…
- Forward3D: PPC Analyst (2012 - 2014) - initially an analyst but taught myself to code to automate a lot of my job
- Durham University: MSc Evolutionary Anthropology (2011 - 2012); BA Archaeology and Anthropology (2007-2011)
Some technical keywords for SEO
SQL, Postgres, Terraform, AWS, Devops, Nix, Agile, Testing, Pairing, Ruby, Golang, Bash, Unix, SSH, CD, CI, API, REST, Rails, Sinatra, DB, Web, TDD, Scripting, JSON, Vim, Emacs, MVC, Git, OOP, Architecture, Software, Backend, Docker, Linux, Microservices, Serverless, Lambda, AWS, Grafana, Kibana
Interests
- evolution / biology / animals / plants
- gardening / chopping wood (got to keep the fire going…) / being outside
- reading
- go (both the language but also the board game)
- programming
- science / space / technology / futurism
- startups
- history