Head of Backend Development for the LifeWorks App. Coding for 15+ years, a TDD advocate, PHP fan, with an interest in Complexity Theory.
Good software is easy to understand, well tested and secure. I am a software developer with 15 years of experience who likes to work with and mentor developers and teams on how they can improve their code quality and security so they can produce better software.
I have experience with various languages including PHP, JavaScript, Rust and TypeScript. If you review my open source contributions you will see I have a great deal of experience with test frameworks, code analysis, documentation and automation. I’ve also written on these topics in detail and given numerous talks to user groups and conferences.
Security is a focus for me, I've done work with platforms like Auth0 and consulted on the topic widely. I've also made open source contributions to security tools focused on JSON Web Tokens and Content Security Policies.
During my career I’ve worked with numerous organisations, big and small, including Eurostar, Immediate Media, Breakthrough Media, The Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and many more. I’ve fulfilled roles ranging from senior developer, technical consultant, architect and manager which provides me with an in-depth understanding of the tech industry and the challenges many organisations face.
I believe I have a great deal of experience and insight to offer. So if your organisation cares about open source and good software practices, or needs help to improve in these areas then we should talk further.
Eurostar is a European rail operator and package holiday provider. I work within their online development team as a Solution Architect and I help define technical solutions so Eurostar can deliver their business goals. The role involves technical research, proof of concepts, documentation, stakeholder consultation, and mentoring developers through technical implementation. The projects I have focussed on have been Security and Content related, and have included work on Auth0, Content Security Policies, and Jam Stack technologies such as Sanity and Vercel. The languages involved include JavaScript, TypeScript, and Scala.
Immediate Media operates a number of large UK media brands, such as the Radio Times and BBC Good Food. I worked on their core WordPress and Symfony platform as a senior developer. I helped them build new features and improve existing ones while mentoring and guiding junior developers on topics such as Test Driven Development, code analysis and software architecture and design. Immediate follow an Agile Scrum workflow, most of their systems are based on AWS and they use development tools such as Vagrant and Docker.
Breakthrough are a communications agency where I was Head of Technology and ran the software development team. It was made up of front-end and back-end developers, dev-ops, QA and project management, and the team ranged in size from 8-16 during the period I was there. The majority of the work was based around the 40 WordPress websites we managed on behalf of their government and public sector clients. We took a modern approach to building WordPress websites including the use of Composer and Vue.js. We also ran and maintained a number of Laravel based websites for system monitoring and internal administration, and we built a number of Jekyl based websites. My role was both hands on and managerial and it included a lot of strategy, architecture and consultation work. I helped design a number of systems including data warehouses for Breakthrough’s government clients. In addition to this we managed and built data insights tools using Python, JavaScript and Tableau. All Breakthrough’s systems we hosted and maintained on AWS.
To review my career history in full please visit my LinkedIn profile linkedin.com/in/robdwaller.
Wllr:Tech is focused on providing organisations with services around code quality and security. The aim is to help organisations improve the software and products they produce so less money is wasted on maintenance issues and more revenue is generated from users. Services provided include training, consultation and implementation help.
StatusPeople was a Social Media Analytics company I founded in 2011. The company was closed in 2018 because I no longer felt I could offer a professional service to our paying clients. StatusPeople developed a number of systems, all built around PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. The main tool was a Social Analytics platform which allowed marketers to interact with their social media channels and track user interaction. This platform was sold to another company in late 2013.
The most successful product though was The Fakers App which was launched in 2012 and did Twitter follow analysis, highlighting how many fake followers an account had. It was very popular, was mentioned in Mashable and on CNN, had 1.5 million users and was still generating incoming when StatusPeople was shut down in 2018. The Fakers App was run as a free service for a further two years and was closed down in early 2020. All the code for the App was open sourced on GitHub so others could make use of some of the ideas contained within.
My time running StatusPeople and supporting my own systems taught me a great deal about coding, dev-ops and database management as I had to build and maintain everything myself. It also taught me a lot about the business of technology and the contract law which sits around it.