David Peterson!

Principal Engineer

Dash purchased Paradigm and the software I helped to create. They offered me an opportunity to continue working on the project I had started, and additionally create an overall technical direction for the company.

When I joined the company, some parts perceived themselves as established, but the focus remained on quick results over maintainable code. This situation, highlighting a mix of startup agility and evolving processes, eventually led me to realize that my commitment to sustainable development practices was not fully compatible with the company's current operational approach.

Key Achievements

• Led a team of experienced developers in completing new feature development, significantly advancing the company's product offerings.
• Implemented agile methodologies, transitioning the team to Kanban for improved process efficiency and project tracking.
• Instituted metrics to analyse time allocation, optimizing resource management and enhancing project outcomes.
• Collaborated cross-functionally with product, QA, and engineering teams to prioritize and estimate new development projects, aligning technical goals with business objectives.
• Restored work-life balance by addressing underestimation issues, reducing overtime, and improving team morale.
• Contributed individually and mentored team members, fostering a culture of continuous learning and professional growth.
• Played a key role in shaping the company’s future technical direction through strategic team collaboration.
• Successfully integrated engineering tasks into the overall schedule, ensuring their timely completion.
• Initiated inter-team meetings to synchronize objectives across departments.
• Started "Lunch and Learn" sessions, encouraging knowledge sharing and skill development among engineers.

Tech Lead

After 7 months as a Senior Software Engineer, Xplor promoted me to a Tech Lead role. In this role, I have again put my extensive people and project management skills into practice.

Key Achievements

• Led and managed two cross-functional teams with 14 developers, consisting of Elixir, React, iOS, and Android engineers in multiple countries.
• Delivered the highest visibility part of highest priority project for the company and released many medium/large features on mobile apps on time.
• Successfully led and coordinated efforts among four distinct teams, integrating their contributions to develop a key security feature for Xplor's largest client.
• Assigned appropriate tasks, set priorities, and mentored junior, mid, and senior engineers to ensure timely delivery of features.
• Communicated regularly with other departments in the business to ensure smooth data flow between backend office childcare systems and consumer-facing apps.
• Created technical and business cases for initiatives I initiated to improve workflow and reduce development time.
• Estimated projects from ideation through to development and post-release tasks, ensuring efficient demand management and scheduling of features.
• Interacted with business leads for a better understanding of features under development. Acted as a technical liaison with major corporate customers.
• Used Agile processes and released often using CI. Simplified CI/CD workflow to aim for no downtime deployments during business hours.
• Helped shape technical policy in teams and the wider Engineering group. Nurtured a culture of automated testing to minimize regressions in releases.
• Presented to Xplor customers to promote the company's software. Organised internal Lunch and Learns to share technical knowledge.
• Detected and triaged production issues and ran Sprint Estimation, Planning, and Retrospective sessions with my team and for other teams in the company.
• Directly tracked team velocity and sprint/release progress to ensure timely delivery of features.
• Hired many engineers at various skill levels to build a strong and talented team.
• Utilised my multimedia experience to create showcase videos for new features.

Senior Software Engineer

Xplor’s vision is to relentlessly make education great by providing software to childcare centres that links staff to children's parents.

I was hired to be part of, and to mentor the Elixir and React team within Xplor. I helped code new features for Xplor's premiere apps, Home and Playground using Elixir, React, Typescript and GraphQL.

We use Agile principles and cross functional teams to continuously deliver high quality features.

Key Achievements

• Mentored and guided junior members of the Elixir and React team
• Designed database schemas and APIs for upcoming features, ensuring technical decisions were appropriate
• Worked on many features using Elixir, React, Typescript, and GraphQL, continuously delivering high quality features following Agile principles
• Refactored large parts of the code (backed by tests), improving code quality and maintainability
• Updated and improved integration tests, ensuring robustness and reliability of the system
• Liaised with outside API providers to ingest data, maintaining good relationships and efficient data exchange
• Ran workshops in best coding practices, helping the team to continuously improve their skills and knowledge
• Acted as relief manager for the cross-functional teams, ensuring smooth operation and communication between teams
• Offered deep technical insights and questioned the status quo in constructive ways, contributing to the continuous improvement of the team's technical excellence.

Playground

Internal Software to link Educators with Parents.

React/Typescript frontend Elixir backend GraphQL Postgres AWS Technologies including Terraform

Home App

Mobile app provided free to parents of children in childcare.

Lead Developer

I worked as a fully remote lead developer using Ruby on Rails in the FinTech industry.

Key Achievements

• Successfully led the development of greenfield projects in the FinTech industry using Ruby on Rails and Agile principles.
• Led the development of a new trading platform for a FinTech startup, resulting in a 25% increase in trading volume within the first month of release.
• Collaborated with the CEO and other stakeholders to define project requirements and ensure timely delivery of features.
• Provided consulting and programming services to FinTech industry clients, delivering high-quality and fault-tolerant systems.
• Designed and implemented a customer portal for Allan Gray that provides a financial information dashboard and the ability to transact shares and managed funds, resulting in a 15% increase in online transactions.
• Successfully passed multiple penetration tests for the system, demonstrating its high level of security and fault tolerance.
• Maintained a clean and maintainable codebase through the use of TDD and refactoring, enabling future features and enhancements to be easily added.
• Refactored a complex payments processing system, reducing its complexity by 50% and improving its maintainability, resulting in a 30% reduction in development time for future enhancements.
• Consistently wrote and maintained automated tests for all features, resulting in a significant reduction in the number of bugs and increased confidence in code changes.

Neo

Internal FinTech site aggregating investor managed fund holdings.

Ruby on Rails Vue and Typescript Postgres GraphQL AWS EC2

Allan Gray

Portal providing dashboard data and linking Allan Gray Customers to stock management.

Ruby on Rails Postgres (Aurora) AWS (Terraform)

Mentor

I discovered my love of mentoring in 2017. I joined The Firehose Project (now part of Trilogy Education) as a mentor in their coding program. The role entailed helping students who were learning programming in our weekly Zoom meetings. I enjoyed watching the students succeed, and it’s a great feeling when you see them do well.