07704 948 943
alex.hopgood@gmail.com
I am a developer experienced at participating in an agile team (using Kanban & Scrum) and dealing with multiple internal and external customers with familiarity working on greenfield and legacy projects for live commercial environments.
I have a desire to support and learn with others, committing to reducing knowledge siloing and am possessed of a quick learning curve.
Keen to produce quality, maintainable software whilst addressing technical debt. I aim to respond to changing circumstances whilst keeping an eye on the “bigger picture” to ensure future strategy isn’t compromised or stymied by near term decisions.
Comfortable representing teams and communicating to the rest of the business.
I am looking for a place to learn new technical skills within a close-knit cross functional team where I can contribute to a high quality, measurable and continually deployable product.
Java Development: Java 8-17, Hibernate, Spring; Boot, MVC, Security & Injection Frameworks, maven, TDD using JUnit, Mockito and AssertJ.
Continuous Integration: Jenkins, Git, Coding standards through Sonarcloud, Cobertura & Jacoco.
Server Administration: Puppet; hiera, eyaml. Vagrant, Docker, Kubernetes/Minikube, Bash scripting. Apache web server and Traefik as reverse proxies. LetsEncrypt for certificates. Consul as a service mesh.
RESTful & SOAP Web Services: API design, integration, consumption and maintenance. Wiremock & Karate for testing & Swagger for documentation.
Agile software development: SCRUM, Kanban & Sprint management
Amazon Web Services: SNS, SQS, ECS, ECR, EKS, CF with local development and testing using localstack and the AWS CLI.
Misc: MySQL (5.6, 5.7)
Comfortable developing on Linux, Windows or MacOS. Experience with both Eclipse & IntelliJ IDEs
Not On The High Street curates an online shopping experience that cannot be replicated anywhere else with unique products crafted by their partners and sold only on their platform.
You won’t be able to find anything from their site on your local high street, all items are made by UK small businesses and many items are able to personalised for any occasion.
Skills: Java 11-17, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Minikube, Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS API Gateway, Cloud Formation, Simple Queue Service (SQS), Simple Notification Service (SNS), Relational Database Service (RDS), App Mesh, Localstack, Spring Boot, Docker, Hibernate, MacOS, Karate, Flyway, Datadog, Grype, Syft, JMeter, Gatling.
Nutmeg provide a managed wealth service with low fees and transparency, enabling customers to manage their investments, ISAs and pensions in a straight forward way through their web interface and mobile clients. Nutmeg are challenging the banking and investment industries by removing the barriers for everyday people to invest, users need no investment know-how as the portfolios are professionally managed. Having raised £42 million in 2016 alone (the largest round in the UK since the vote to leave the European Union) and followed that with backing from Goldman Sachs to the tune of £45 million in 2019, Nutmeg are planning to take their business plan international.
Worked in the operational excellence (O.E.) team on the main Nutmeg product supporting the day to day operations. This was done by increasing unit test coverage, providing bug fixes and working with the product team to deliver improved functionality.
Worked within the Penetration Test Online team to action items raised by an external penetration test and conducted internal penetration tests against our own APIs.
To prepare Nutmeg for the MIFID-II legislation in January 2018 I participated in a greenfield project to report Nutmeg’s trading activity to the FCA as it happened.
Using Spring Boot micro services with AWS SQS and SNS as the messaging platform between the services we collated individual trades into blocks for submission.
Team member in the team responsible for creating the next generation platform for Nutmeg’s expansion:
Skills: MacOS, Docker, JDBI, JPA, Java 8, Karate, Postman, Swagger, PlantUML, Hexagonal Architecture, Spring Boot, Json Web Tokens (JWTs), Marathon
Masabi provide an industry leading mobile ticketing platform for the UK rail market and is an emergent player as a solution for metropolitan transport agencies worldwide. Over four years the UK product has grown from revenues of £4 million to £69 million in 2016:
The UK rail product included branding and management of between 11 and 12 brands of well-known train operating companies (VirginTrains, FirstHullTrains, FirstTranpennineExpress, FirstGreatWestern, FirstCapitalConnect, FirstScotRail, AbellioGreaterAnglia, CrossCountry, ChilternRailways, RedSpottedHanky, EastMidlandsTrains, O2, NorthernTrains, AbellioScotRail) as well as working with the national body the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) to provide industry wide expertise and services.
Line managed development team of 2 server developers, 1 client developer and 2 quality analysts; leave management, 1-2-1’s, training / conferences.
Maintained and improved the legacy product that provides Masabi’s main UK revenue source.
Implemented peer to peer shared credential database within the team to ensure that everyone had secure access to cross-team resources.
Encouraged pairing between dev and qa to increase communication and understanding of features and work.
Implemented a rolling support role to ensure that no person would be a single point of failure or reliance, enabling us to provide support during office hours year round.
Led and encouraged knowledge and responsibility sharing amongst the team (not quite cross functional) through pairing, responsibility switching (e.g. support role), shared doc writeups, team presentations and hack days.
Ensured business and customer critical stats runs were completed on the day they were needed, brought the run time down from two days to an hour and also distributed the knowledge so one of three team members could pick up the task if others had high priority items already in play.
Created acceptance criteria to help provide a universal level of acceptance from a developer, quality analyst and account manager view.
Ran stand ups, sprint planning, retrospective, backlog grooming and stakeholder meetings (2015-01-01 to 2015-06-01) until a product manager could be found. Instigated lead developer lunch meetings.
Responsible for architectural design decisions (shared cache, externalised properties etc).
Mentored members outside of my own team.
Code Reviews for PCI compliance.
Founded a cross-team security council to review existing and newly discovered vulnerabilities and action updates.
Implemented industry standard for RSP6 barcodes via code and turned this into a service.
Creation of a SOAP web service for an industry standard used by a high profile client (ATOC) for consumption by the entire rail industry.
Instigated cross-team server meetings to encourage sharing of common domain problems and solutions.
Led team security best practices by example ensuring the team took ownership for everyday security matters (2FA, password managers, screen locking etc).
Created detailed documentation to speed up and standardise our release process.
Integration with multiple 3rd party SOAP web services and updating of web service schemas (wsdl files); Atos Origin (now Worldline), TheTrainline, National Rail Enquiries (NRE), National Union of Students (NUS).
Unit testing using Junit (used TDD), Mockito, Builder Pattern, JFlux (for rapid feedback).
Encouraged and led “refactor Fridays” to increase code quality on a legacy code base.
Increased code coverage from 35% to 60% across the three main projects, up to 70% on specific ones (tested with Cobertura in eclipse and via Maven and Jenkins).
Skills: Java 6, Spring 3.x; MVC, Security & Injection Frameworks, Jersey, DropWizard, Hibernate, Tomcat, SOAP Web Services, Apache CXF, Cobertura, Subversion, Bamboo CI, MySQL 5.5, maven, JUnit 4.x, Mockito
Isca’s main focus was on creating kiosks and mobile applications for the retail sector.
Formed of a cross functional engineering team encompassing agile planning and execution using Embedded Windows, Java, SIP/VOIP Software Switch and web technologies (HTML, CSS and Javascript). These were used to provide the core product of a touch screen kiosk with a telephony enabled web application for Point of Sales (POS) interaction with customers backed by an on site telephony and web server.
Customers were located in the UK, Canada and France where over 200 kiosks were deployed to a leading department store.
The company was refounded in Canada under the name of Toushay in 2012.
Gained extensive knowledge of the Java development environment over four years.
Set up a continuous development environment, testing framework and coding standards through the use of Jenkins (CI), Junit, jBehave/Selenium (testing), Sonar (code standards) and Maven & Artifactory (build & publishing tools).
Evaluated various mobile/embedded operating systems for use as a touch screen kiosk operating system, ended up choosing Windows Embedded Standard 2009 (WES 2009).
Once the choice was made, trained colleagues in deployment and maintenance of the mobile OS as well as taking ownership of continuing customisation.
Devised a custom command line tool to back up, upgrade or restore a WES 2009 OS image to use when in the field and in the lab with our touch screen kiosks.
Experienced with using programming frameworks/packages/APIs to prevent “reinventing the wheel”.
Managed product roadmap leading to the implementation of SCRUM process for the company which resulted in consistently high quality product iterations.
Key contributor to planning, review and retrospective meetings where compromise, negotiation and discussion required, allowing the agile process to flow.
Experienced working within a small multidisciplinary team where clear communication is vital to preventing wasted effort and time.
Performed in a high pressure environment closely with the same small group of people, often to a deadline, requiring putting in extra time as it is needed. To be a successful part of a team under such circumstances requires a positive outlook to maintain morale and an ability to get on productively with many personality types.
Familiar with identifying and evaluating software toolsets.
Skills: Subversion, JUnit 4.x, HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, JQuery Mobile, Bootstrap, Google Web Toolkit, Windows Embedded Standard 2009 & 7 (WES 2009 & WES 7), Google App Engine, MongoDB, Experience with Freeswitch and SIP standards
Wesley Clover is the investment vehicle of Sir Terry Matthews a serial technology business founder with companies such as Mitel, Newbridge Networks and Sandvine. Its role is to seed new start up companies (typically with new graduates) that can attack specific technology verticals that larger companies lack the agility or resources to tackle.
During a three month graduate placement in Ottawa, Canada I was seconded to a small working group where I was vetted for suitability and compatibility for a start up incubation program with other graduates. These graduates came from Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea universities in the UK, Waterloo University in Canada and Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.
I developed business technology ideas and concepts in a competitive environment to win backing to create a start up.
Working as part of a team in this large retailer my main role was to provide the best customer experience possible in keeping with the company’s high standards. This ranged from face-to-face dealings with the public to indirectly via the phones.
I worked well under pressure, whilst proving to be enthusiastic, flexible and adaptable.
Managed to keep up-to-date in an ever changing industry/medium.
Responsible for maintaining store displays, money handling, training of peers and new staff, stock room duties, receipt of deliveries.
Communication with colleagues and dealings with customers requiring tact and respect have rounded and improved my communication skills on a personal and informal level.
My experience in retail has resulted in a dynamic approach to problem solving where solutions are often needed quickly and discretely.
As a member of staff over the very busy Christmas period I had to prove myself capable of dealing with large volumes of customers and incoming stock whilst being friendly, informative and keeping the merchandising as tidy and high impact as possible to attract custom.
Gained the ability to work with and integrate into a team with individuals of various strengths, merits and dispositions. Stamina was required for long early opening shifts where both till and kitchen work would be required and also when dealing with difficult customers. Patience and tenacity were qualities gained due to the fast paced work environment where reactivity is also beneficial. A methodical approach was fostered through “clean as you go” by keeping work areas clean and tidy whilst also ensuring that food could be produced as and when needed.
Good working knowledge of various programming languages including Prolog, Java, Delphi, C, Maude, CLIPS, ASP, C#, Haskell. Programming paradigms included functional, declarative and object-oriented.
Group work undertaken to jointly develop, document and deliver a software project, overcoming personal, design, implementation and scheduling factors.
Individual dissertation completed involving independent research and learning of parallelism and compiler theory. Resulting in fully documented work implementing said theory into a working prototype product.
Knowledge of entrepreneurship and product lifecycle including the importance of planning throughout using appropriate techniques such as the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and the Waterfall methodology.
Arthur Mellows Village College.
A-Levels in Mathematics(B), History(B) & Geography(C), AS-Levels in Chemistry(C) & General Studies(B).
Arthur Mellows Village College.
12 G.C.S.E.s gained 5 (A), 4 (B), 2 (C), 1 (D).
Currently studying towards the Kali Linux Certified Professional (KLCP) qualification.
Member of the South London Branch
Course completed at 82%, covering a broad range of AWS technologies. Not certified by AWS.
Covering: Container Runtimes, Docker Daemon, Container Operations, Images, Dockerfiles, Networking, Storage and Multi-container applications.
Covering: Account Enumeration, Automated Attacks, Brute Force Attacks, Content Security Policies, Cookies, Cross Site Request Forgeries (CSRF), Injection attacks, Session Hijack
Also available as a Pluralsight companion course
Syllabus
A two day workshop around introducing architecture to the agile methodology, ensuring enough architecture is thought of before coding without losing the benefits of agility and fast feedback.
Learning how much detail is enough; how to convey important architectural decisions without skimping on detail or conversely supplying too much detail that they get buried.
I maintain a small homelab for career development and side projects allowing me to explore new technologies and gain experience DevOps by running my own infrastructure.
Indoor sports climbing, Mountain biking, Jogging.
Cooking, reading science fiction and pursuing my own technical projects.
A kayaking group based on the Thames at Kew Bridge and the Union Canal Brentford
Participated up to the gold level of the award, through regular gym sessions, climbing and a residential project on building dry stone walls in the Trough of Bowland and the gold level expedition.
My experiences doing the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and other outdoor pursuits have helped me develop team centric skills; demonstrating resourcefulness as a group, determination to achieve joint goals and the support and motivation of others to maintain morale. These skills resulted in a joint work ethic towards a common goal under difficult circumstances. Participation in the award has fostered my individual resourcefulness, determination and independence.
Participated in many outdoors, adventure and community activities. Responsible for drawing up activity programmes for unit, chairing of meetings, communication with group and district scout leaders as well as other venture units and ranger units. Including support of younger counterparts in the group such as the local scout and cub units.
Participated in regular trips to an indoor climbing and bouldering wall, a form of exercise and social event in one.
Promoted self discipline, emotional control and respect for others. Regularly took part in competitive training and set pieces, teaching and support of other students either junior or senior was encouraged.
A course covering the basics needed to man a small sailing dinghy (topper or laser pico) and participate as part of a three man crew on a small yacht (laser trio).
