front end capabilities

.Net Core, C#, C++, VB6, VB.Net, Winforms, Delphi, VBA, SSIS, SSBI, EDI, NHibernate, Entity Framework, Dapper, WCF, performance optimisation. Acceleration of code. Design patterns. Message based ESB implementations and middle tiers. Multi-threaded implementations. Thorough understanding of thread safety and multi-threaded models and behaviours.

I obey single responsibility and consider designs in depth to help future-proof candidate class hierarchies.

Design - realising business requirements into implementation specifications. Employ strictness of mind. Rely on abstractions not concretions!

My IT Director at the time appeared at my desk and gave me a problem. A major customer in Ireland had suffered a full system outage due to a problem with an Oracle database that threatened the monthly staff salary payments run expected later the same day. Without a fix from me, every Intel employee in the world would not be paid! I didn’t have sufficient time to fly out to site, and I couldn’t remote into the affected tin. I retreated to a quiet office and emerged after 2 hours with a script to be executed from a ‘go.bat’ start by the customer, along with precise instructions for roll-out. The client followed my instructions and executed the script against their database which achieved a full database rebuild and re-initialisation and data rescue from a moment prior to the system crash. 15 minutes later the system came back online, and later that day all Intel staff salary payments were transferred to staff accounts as expected! 

Another customer had a difficult project that suffered high staff and PM turnover and seemed to never progress. This was a relatively small system, but it could not pass through UAT with a Hedge Fund client. More and more senior people up to Worldwide Board level were becoming involved as fines and late delivery penalties began to kick in. As a nearby developer, I heard the ongoing daily commotion around the office, and I sat next to a newly promoted department manager who had been a close colleague and my prior team lead. Upon realising that he had inherited the problem, I intervened. I offered my thoughts about problems as I saw them, and assured him of a gut-feeling that the system shouldn’t be so complicated, and that its problems could be solved, and that I would solve them. We had a single video conference with the much frustrated client, and I pushed and questioned until I understood the exact nature of the customer complaints. Later analysing the code I confirmed the system was indeed flawed in many aspects that contributed to the list of complaints from the client. I proposed a plan of action, and committed to using my free time over the Xmas change embargo period. After trying to achieve UAT for 2 years, with heavy contractor resources coming and going, within a further 3 weeks the problems were resolved and the customer successfully signed off UAT, and asked only one question – ‘Why wasn’t Gary Wilson involved 2 years ago?’. 

An insurance client brought me in to connect up JavaScript front end views with models pulled from existing java based web services over SOAP. I soon realised the extent of their legacy web and middleware offerings and made a case to re-architect both the web UI and service layers using HTML5 with Angular and a suite of C# based web services against Entity Framework over SQL Server. I helped establish a thread-safe web architecture and steered and enhanced internal staff capability to take the project forward to success.