christophertownsondotcom

Dr. Christo­pher Town­son, BA MSt PhD

Per­sonal Statement

I am a soft­ware devel­oper and techi­cal archi­tect with strong design skills and exten­sive expe­ri­ence in and com­mit­ment to test-driven, agile method­olo­gies. I have worked suc­cess­fully on a num­ber of com­plex, enterprise-level projects, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on cus­tom work­flow, inte­gra­tion, and scal­a­bil­ity prob­lems where I have also been tech­ni­cal lead with men­tor­ing and advo­cacy respon­si­bil­i­ties. I am look­ing to uti­lize this knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence to add value to exist­ing teams through the injec­tion of fresh ideas or pro­vid­ing guid­ance in the estab­lish­ment of new projects and/or teams. Finally, I pos­sess sig­nif­i­cant expe­ri­ence within the pub­lish­ing and edu­ca­tion domains. There­fore, I am able to make par­tic­u­larly valu­able con­tri­bu­tions in these areas.

Key Skills

Employ­ment History

1. Novem­ber 2010 — Jan­u­ary 2011: Senior Java Devel­oper, Auto­quake Ltd., Lon­don.

   In Novem­ber 2010 I joined Auto­quake as part of a project to rede­velop their legacy in-house stock man­age­ment sys­tem and intro­duce test-driven devel­op­ment prac­tices. The exist­ing sys­tem is extremely com­plex and brit­tle with sig­nif­i­cant scal­a­bil­ity issues. My pro­posed solu­tion, of which the first phase of work was com­pleted in 2 iter­a­tions, was the rapid, incre­men­tal migra­tion of ver­ti­cal slices of busi­ness crit­i­cal func­tion­al­ity into a new appli­ca­tion built using Groovy and Grails. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and data syn­chro­niza­tion with the exist­ing sys­tem being man­aged through a loosely-coupled message-based “anti-corruption layer”. This approach should ensure that the busi­ness can take advan­tage of mod­ern rapid devel­op­ment tech­niques and the oppor­tu­nity to enhance and expand func­tion­al­ity with­out endan­ger­ing the func­tion­al­ity pro­vided by the exist­ing sys­tem by avoid­ing changes to an untested and tightly-coupled appli­ca­tion (or the large up-front cost of intro­duc­ing tests around it).

2. March 2008 – Novem­ber 2010: Senior Java Devel­oper, Bio­med Cen­tral Ltd., Lon­don

   Before join­ing Auto­quake, I was senior devel­oper for Bio­med Cen­tral, the worlds first and lead­ing open access pub­lisher, with line man­age­ment respon­si­bil­i­ties for a team of 6 devel­op­ers (not includ­ing con­trac­tors). Dur­ing my time there, I man­aged the tran­si­tion of the company’s legacy work­flow sys­tem to employ mod­ern, light-weight, object-oriented tech­nolo­gies using agile, test and domain-driven method­olo­gies. Respon­si­bil­i­ties include men­tor­ing, code review, writ­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tions (as “story cards”), devis­ing refac­tor­ing and release strate­gies in addi­tion to hands-on project devel­op­ment work.

   Main achieve­ments

   • Numer­ous major fea­ture additions
   • Test cov­er­age raised from 10.9% to 33.6% on exist­ing code dur­ing deliv­ery of busi­ness projects
   • 70%+ cov­er­age on all newly added code
   • Total lines of code reduced by 11%
   • Code com­plex­ity reduced by 45%
   • Total num­ber of deliv­er­able arte­facts reduced from 18 to 5
   • Man­aged tran­si­tion from water­fall to agile method
   • Col­lab­o­rated with and man­aged work of con­tract devel­op­ers from Thought­Works and Züh­lke Engi­neer­ing, both locally and remotely

3. Jan­u­ary 2006 – March 2008: Emerg­ing Tech­nolo­gies Devel­oper, Nature Pub­lish­ing Group, Lon­don

   Pri­mary respon­si­bil­i­ties included research­ing the lat­est in web tech­nol­ogy and cul­ture and ascer­tain­ing their use value for the com­pany. On a day-to-day basis, this involved web appli­ca­tion pro­to­typ­ing and devel­op­ment (pri­mar­ily in Java, but also in script­ing lan­guages such as PHP and Ruby) along­side sys­tems archi­tec­ture and prod­uct eval­u­a­tion. In addi­tion to pro­gram­ming exper­tise and a close famil­iar­ity with cut­ting edge web tech­nolo­gies, cre­ativ­ity, imag­i­na­tion and ini­tia­tive were required to spot emerg­ing trends and realise their busi­ness potential.

   Main achieve­ments

   • Eval­u­a­tion and sub­se­quent intro­duc­tion of native XML data­base (Mark Logic) to improve retrieval and search of the cor­pus of Nature arti­cles (XML doc­u­ment archive)
   • Devel­op­ment of cus­tom con­fig­u­ra­tion frame­work to sim­plify and aid man­age­ment of large num­ber of Veloc­ity templates

4. March 2005 – Jan­u­ary 2006: Con­tract Devel­oper, Nature Pub­lish­ing Group, Lon­don

   I ini­tially joined NPG, pub­lisher of the pre­mier sci­ence jour­nal ‘Nature’, on a 6-month con­tract dur­ing a redesign project which included the aim imple­ment­ing web stan­dards and acces­si­bil­ity guide­lines in the view tier across their entire prod­uct port­fo­lio. Respon­si­bil­i­ties included tool devel­op­ment and cod­ing of acces­si­ble, standards-compliant XHTML/CSS tem­plates using Apache Velocity.

5. Octo­ber 2004 – March 2005: Web Devel­op­ment Con­sul­tant (Part Time), Uni­ver­sity of Essex Col­lec­tion of Latin Amer­i­can Art, Colch­ester

   As part of an AHRC-funded project to bring the Uni­ver­sity of Essex Col­lec­tion of Latin Amer­i­can Art to the web, I was con­tracted to trans­late the project objec­tives into a tech­ni­cal strat­egy. This involved the pro­duc­tion of pro­to­type designs and wire­frames detail­ing the organ­i­sa­tional struc­ture of the site and the oper­a­tion of the user inter­face and search engine. Of crit­i­cal impor­tance was the abil­ity to under­stand the require­ments of the projects non-technical man­age­ment in con­cert with those of the intended user demo­graphic and sub­se­quently present these in a for­mat which could be read­ily com­pre­hended and imple­mented by the devel­op­ment team.

6. Octo­ber 2002 – Octo­ber 2004: Web Mas­ter (Part Time), Aurora Pub­li­ca­tions Ltd., London

   As web mas­ter for Aurora Pub­li­ca­tions, I had sole respon­si­bil­ity for the company’s online pres­ence. This incor­po­rated the design and devel­op­ment of a database-driven web appli­ca­tion using LAMP for the deliv­ery of mag­a­zine issue con­tent pub­lished on a bi-monthly sched­ule. A broad skill-set was required includ­ing programming/scripting (PHP/Perl), data­base and server admin­is­tra­tion (Linux, MySQL), and web design.

7. Novem­ber 1996 – July 1998: Web Mas­ter, Atrium Book­shop Ltd., London

   As web mas­ter for Atrium, I had sole respon­si­bil­ity for the company’s online pres­ence. This incor­po­rated the design and devel­op­ment of a site from scratch using HTML, JavaScript, and Perl.

Edu­ca­tional History

1. Octo­ber 1999 – March 2005: PhD, Uni­ver­sity of Essex (Pass with­out corrections)

   My PhD research focused on the impli­ca­tions of Hei­deg­ger­ian ontol­ogy for study of site-specific art as a move­ment in art from the 1960s onwards. Sub­ject areas cov­ered: Phi­los­o­phy, Art His­tory and Theory.

2. Octo­ber 1998 – July 1999: MSt, Uni­ver­sity of Oxford (Distinction)

   Sur­veyed the con­ti­nen­tal tra­di­tion in aes­thet­ics from Kant to the present with a par­tic­u­lar focus on 20th-century French & Ger­man phe­nom­e­nol­ogy. Sub­ject areas cov­ered: Phi­los­o­phy, Art His­tory and Theory.

3. Octo­ber 1993 – July 1996: BA(Hons.), Uni­ver­sity of Essex (First Class)

   Sub­ject areas cov­ered: Art His­tory and The­ory, Phi­los­o­phy, Politics.

4. Sep­tem­ber 1987 – July 1993: Here­ford Cathe­dral School, Hereford

   1 ‘S’ Level (Eng­lish Lan­guage), 4 ‘A’ Lev­els (AABC), 9 GCSEs above grade C.

Ref­er­ences

Ref­er­ences are avail­able upon request.