James Stuart Tait

Leading a core team of two Java EE Developers and a DBA, I am responsible for the development and maintenance of Aeromanager, the Rolls-Royce customer-facing web portal for the management of civil aero engines. I work with a small team within Rolls-Royce to determine, define and prioritise requirements. I am responsible for scheduling items for development, testing and release, managing the team's workload, mentoring team members and removing impediments to enable the release schedule to be met.

As part of a drive to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction, I initiated and supported the development of a JUnit test suite for the application and the adoption of Agile processes for development.

Wyrd Dreams is a freelance consultancy providing a variety of services, including web design, custom application development, systems and network administration, and hardware and software support among others and specialising in open source and open standards. An example of my work can be found at the Aldercar and Langley Mill Parish Council web site.

As part of a three-man team, I was responsible for the ongoing development and maintenance of our SMS messaging and billing platforms. The platforms were written in Java/J2EE on IBM WebSphere, utilising JSP, servlets, JMS, EJB (including both container-managed and bean-managed persistence as well as message-driven beans), Struts and an Oracle 9i back-end. Our diverse range of services included wi-fi credentials for The Cloud; PINs for Nokia's music download services (including MyCokeMusic, MSN Music, Virgin Megastores, Wanadoo, Tiscali, MTV, NTLWorld and HMV in the UK as well as services in France, Eire, Austria and Germany); and enabling the mobile banking services of First Direct and HSBC provided by Monilink. I liaised directly with customers and suppliers to establish and prioritise requirements, maintaining an ongoing development roadmap while also providing application support, including out-of-hours work to maintain a 99.5% availability as per our SLAs.

In support of best practise and to enable us to meet our availability requirements, I produced our development and deployment process documents. The process was based on test-driven development, with unit tests to ensure functional requirements were met and avoid regressions. A continuous build environment gave early warning of build problems and Ant scripts were used to automate building and packaging. All releases were tested thoroughly with both manual and automated tests on our staging environment before being promoted to production.

With such a small team, I also assumed responsibility for certain systems administration tasks. I instigated and oversaw the installation of eGroupware within the company as a centralised ticket tracking and project management tool and for its wiki and other collaboration features, as well as the introduction of online meetings via Skype IM to aid with the transition of support staff from their various legacy systems. I also wrote the system startup scripts for our web and application servers to allow all services to start in the correct order after a hardware failure.

Working as part of a team of around 70 individuals, I was responsible for the development of bespoke applications designed to be tailor-made solutions to the business needs of our clients. Development was in any of a number of languages, but Java/J2EE (including JSP, servlets and frameworks such as Struts and Hibernate), XML, HTML, JavaScript and SQL feature heavily.

Other technologies include CSS, C/C++, Apache web server, Vignette V7 VCM Server and CodeMesh JunC++ion Java Bridge, as well as a number of mobile phone technologies, including WAP/WML, Volantis Mariner multi-channel server, Empower Interactive MSP 3.1.3 and First Hop Message Router for SMS routing.

I have worked closely with several mobile telecommunicatons service providers, helping our applications to attain validation for operation on live service networks. This involved performance of a series of test scripts and analysis of SMPP 3.3, SMPP 3.4 and SEMA OiS traffic as it was transmitted to the SMS Service Centres.

I am familiar with a number of platforms and operating systems, including Linux, Windows 2000/NT/XP and Solaris, and am comfortable with UML, RUP and SCRUM.

As part of a two-man team, I was responsible for operational maintenance of over 50 office PCs and 135 PC-based tills in 75 shops. The role was widely varied and mixed basic administration with network diagnostics and resource management, as well as the upgrade and repair of PCs. I also played a major role in collecting sales data from the tills and ensuring that accurate sales figures were produced and credit card transactions were honoured.

I helped with the migration of our network from Novell Netware 4.11 to Windows NT 4, and also played a pivotal role in the change of our hardware support company, vastly improving the level of support whilst realising vast cost savings.

In the second part of my role I was closely involved in developing new systems at the shops and Head Office, streamlining procedures and producing software to ease day-to-day administration. This included developing SQL queries to import and filter stock and sales data, writing interface programs in C to enable our proprietary systems to work together and share data, and writing report programs to extract data from raw files and present it in a human-readable form.

Over a three-year course I learned about various aspects of computing in the workplace and the home. The course introduced me to several programming languages, including C, C++, SQL, Java, JavaScript, HTML and Visual Basic, and allowed me to sample different programming techniques. It brought me into contact with a range of Operating Systems and different network architectures, the most prominent of which was MSDOS/Windows 3.11 on a Novell network, but also including Sun Solaris and Vax/VMS with TCP/IP networking.