David Peterson!

MyXplor Pty Ltd - Education

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

"In fact, so good we decided to put him in charge" - Sep 2021 quarterly assessment

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.

When I took over the role, I had 4 direct reports and managed two 7 person-strong cross functional teams. Both teams have a mix of Elixir, React, iOS and Android developers residing in Australia and Vietnam. I was responsible for delivering new features for "Parent Engagement" software - the highest visibility group for Xplor Education, and the group that is key to future expansion.

I am tasked with ensuring the smooth flow of data between the different areas of the company - from backend office childcare systems, through to consumer-facing apps.

My responsibilities in this role include:
- Line manager to the ELixir and React developers;
- Project management for cross functional teams (mix of frontend and backend developers);
- Demand management and scheduling features;
- Estimating projects from ideation through to development and post-release tasks;
- Running Sprint Estimation, Planning and Retrospective sessions with my team and for other teams in the company;
- Running daily standups;
- Direct and track team velocity and sprint/release progress;
- Detect and triage production issues;

In my time in the role, I have:
- Been responsible for delivering the highest visibility part of the highest priority project for the company;
- Released 5 medium/large features on our mobile apps on time;
- Assigned appropriate tasks and set priorities for each of the 14 team members;
- Interacted with business leads for a better understanding of the features under development;
- Continued to work using Agile processes and released often using CI;
- Helped to shape technical policy - both in my teams and the wider Engineering group;
- Hired many engineers at various skill levels;
- Communicated complex technical information effectively and appropriately;
- Nurtured a culture of automated testing - to ensure we minimise regressions in our releases

MyXplor Pty Ltd - Education

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.

Skills used in this role:
- Mentored junior members of the team;
- Guided the team in appropriate technical decisions;
- Designed database schemas and APIs for upcoming features;
- Worked on many features in multiple languages;
- Refactored large parts of the code;
- Updated and improved integration tests;
- Liaised with outside API providers to ingest data;
- Ran workshops in best coding practices;
- Questioned the status quo in constructive ways;
- Offered deep technical insights;
- Acted as relief manager for the cross functional teams.

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.

Paradigm Global Solutions

I worked as a fully remote lead developer using Ruby on Rails in the FinTech industry. In this role, I have worked closely with the CEO to understand the requirements of a number of greenfield projects. We use Agile principles including TDD and refactoring along with a service-based approach to keep the codebase clean for future features.

As part of this role, I have provided consulting and programming services to Paradigm clients in the FinTech industry. For example, for Allan Gray we designed and implemented a customer portal providing a financial information dashboard and the ability to transact shares and managed funds. This is a highly fault tolerant system that regularly passes penetration tests.

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)

Firehose Project

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.

Digital Photo Secrets

In 2006, I started creating new online businesses from my hobbies. First was Digital Photo Secrets, giving away free photography tips and selling ebooks and courses I created for sale online.

This website is self-running and uses Internet Marketing techniques to soft-sell my products while giving away lots of valuable information. Over 700,000 readers have signed up to my weekly newsletter and free tips. Over 10,000 customers have purchased my products over the years.

I have hired 7 remote part time contractors from all around the world (England, South Africa and the USA) to help me with the running of the site. During this time, I open-sourced the Shutterstock (photo library) API wrapper I created.

Digital Photo Secrets

Free Photography Tips, EBooks and Videos.

Ruby and Sinatra Postfix AWS EC2 Internet Marketing

World of Warcraft Websites

While recovering from illness, I started raiding in World of Warcraft. I wanted to know what the most popular class talents were for my alt toons, so I built a website that scraped the Blizzard Armory website and summarized this data. The scanner and site were written in Ruby/Sinatra and constantly summarised over 30 million toons and 500 thousand guilds.

I open-sourced the wrapper I wrote to the WoW API. Ultimately the shrinking player-base of World of Warcraft, and the large cost of servers to call and summarize the WoW API meant that I could no longer afford to keep running these sites, so I shut them down in 2018.

GuildOx

Warcraft-based Guild and Toon progression. The site is no longer live, but can be viewed through the Wayback Machine

Ruby and Sinatra Perl Postfix Blizzard's API AWS EC2

Wow Popular

Warcraft-based site ranking specs, gear and talents. The site is no longer live, but can be viewed through the Wayback Machine

Ruby and Sinatra Mysql Dedicated server