About
As mentioned elsewhere on this site I'm a graduate of The University of Hulls Centre for Internet Computing (part of its Computer Science Dept located at a satellite campus in Scarborough).
After graduating from the CIC I was employed as an IT Consultant / Developer / Data Analyst where my role was split between developing in house applications and testing/supporting software at one of the UK's largest banks.
The in house development was split between two main projects:
- Standardising the output from a variety of data profiling tools and reporting graphically various aspects of data quality, such as degree of population, type consistency and fitness for purpose based on user defined business rules of large scale systems (typically 10 to 30 million records). This used a mix of Excel, a mix of data profiling tools, XHTML, CSS, PHP and SQL.
- A branching and merging tool capable of analysing development streams (projects, branches and tags) within an Ab Initio EME, reporting on conflicts, deciding if the conflict could be resolved automatically, creating reports on all conflict types and a script capable of automatically resolving certain types of conflicts whilst creating it own progress report as to the state of the resolution process should it be interrupted. This used a mix of PHP, CSS, JavaScript, XML, shell scripts and Ab Initio.
Having been given a design spec and Ab Initio specific commands by senior colleagues I was responsible for designing, developing and documenting the naming conventions, directory structure, user and deployment guides as well as being involved in the testing and presentation to potential clients.
The testing and supporting role was split as follows:
- Testing new large scale data processing applications prior to them receiving approval to becoming live systems. This involved reading documentation such as DFD's, data dictionaries and comparing against code that had been/ was being developed and identifying potential failure points, unnecessary dependencies between processes and how failures such as non-standardised data were handled and then providing feedback to project managers, development teams and various data suppliers.
- Investigating the root cause of incidents on live banking systems and reporting back to project managers the cause of the incident along with what steps needed to be taken to get the system back up and running, such as getting data suppliers to rectify data errors and resend their files, as well as recommending code changes to limit the effect of similar incidents should they recur.
When the Financial IT consultancy sector took a downturn I returned to university for two years to study mathematics and take a PGCE to teach the subject at secondary school.
between 2014-2019 To be completed