The Crunchy Corner

The Crunchy Corner was set up ten years ago as I wanted to apply the knowledge I had gained so far in a wider range of industries while being exposed to different business processes and technologies. With that experience I feel confident that working together with your organisation we can make the most of your information, teams and systems.

I have worked with major organisations in the financial, health care and security sectors, these include: Motability Operations, Sporting Index, Finkit (formerly Monitise) and BT Global Services. A full list of clients and case studies can be found here.

Software Development

Tailored solutions give clients the reliability, quality and support that is vital in today's business environment.

Systems are usually based on a mixture of languages running on a wide variety of platforms, this means any additions to your team are unlikely to have a background that perfectly matches your unique combination of frameworks, chosen OS, databases, testing tools firewalls and other ancialliary services. A sensible approach is to find someone who has a solid knowledge on the majority of technologies you use and the flexibility to pick up any additional ones quickly.

So whether you rely on Java, JavaScript, sql server, oracle db, nosql, node, unix or windows I feel confident I can meet your organisation's requirements.

Integration Services

Organisations sometimes have a myriad of systems acting as stand alone silos which hold information vital to more than just one part of the business, allternatively they may rely on third-party data sources or external equipment which provide data in real-time basis, this then needs to be fed into the rest of the infrastructure

Integration allows your organisation to treat these disparate data sources -either by data migration or through automated data exchange- as a single, cohesive data source. This then allows you to increase the speed of individual transactions, gives you access to more timely reporting, and more importantly, vastly reduces data quality issues by automating system interactions.

In some cases it will be necessary to review and modify the existing codebase to meet new integration needs. With many years in software development you can rest assured any changes made as part of your project will be seamless.

System Analysis, Deployment and Support

Upgrades, moves to alternative technologies and the introduction of new components or infrastructure can affect existing systems. Using the experience I have accumulated through different projects in a number of industries I can help analyse the impact such a move will have on your current processes. This will help to identify what changes are needed in order to support the move or identify alternative approaches to acheieve the desired result.

About Me

I am a software consultant based in London, my focus is development and integration services. I specialise in working with organisations that produce business support software systems.

I understand the commercial needs of modern businesses and how custom software can be used to improve performance and profitability. Whether you need bespoke software development, or additional programming services to complete an existing project, I can help.

If the application you want is stand-alone, web-based or mobile application; using a custom database and based across platforms I can help with free advice and a detailed quotation for custom software.

My mission is to solve challenging technical problems in partnership with my clients.

What I offer

I strive to understand the business needs of my clients, and how the appropriate technology can be a tool to make modern businesses more profitable.

Combining technical excellence with great customer service and value for money.

I value creativity and collaboration; ideas should be shared, contributions should be welcomed, all with the aim of achieving the agreed common goal.

My background

Having made a conscious decision to achieve exposure to a wide range of industries I am confident I can fit in in any business environment, some of the sectors I have worked in include

At the same time the spectrum of technologies I have worked with has grown from the mainstream to the more esoteric side of devevelopment and system integration, this includes

• Development: Java, JavaScript, Fuse, Spring, Hibernate, MyBatis, Struts, SQL, shell scripting, Perl, C, C++, LISP/scheme, COBOL, Pick Basic, Databasic, CCL, Monk, Enform, VB, M68K. TDD, BDD, Cucumber, Selenium, Geb. Intellij, Eclipse, Ant, Maven, Ivy, Git, Docker, Jenkins. Performance tuning.
• Messaging: IBM WebSphere MQ v5/6.x, WebLogic, SeeBeyond eGate. REST, JSON, XML, SOAP, X12, HL7, RIMs, EDIFACT, FIX, eGIF, CorDM, HL7
• Environment: Unix (IBM AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux), HP NonStop, Universe (Pick).
• Productivity Tools: Atlassian, HP Openview, Borland StarTeam, Mercury Quality Centre, Merant Dimensions, Subversion, Microsoft, Lotus, PeopleSoft, Vantive CRM.
• Analysis: GAP/System analysis, data modelling, capacity planning. system integration. Exit strategy analysis: Code / documentation reconciliation.

Over time I have worked with a large number organizations from a wide range of industries. The projects vary from simple stand alone database browsers through to a Europe-wide mobile payments system.

I use a combination of technical and business skills to create custom software solutions that work. I have extensive experience in gathering, managing and documenting business and functional requirements, communicating effectively with management, developers, test teams and infrstructure engineers.

Motability Operations Ltd

Providers of vehicles and Services to the Motability scheme. Managing over 600,000 vehicles on the road and at any one time.

• Fuse services allowing customers to track the current status of their application. Integrations between MO systems and government agencies/service suppliers. POC android clients. Application UI and functionality upgrade (JavaScript/Bootstrap). Automated testing (Geb/Selenium).
• Enhancements to existing systems; each change requires detailed impact analysis of up to 9 enterprise-wide systems. The application stack consists of MS SQL server, Jboss EAP, Java, JavaScript, Groovy and Struts. Supporting 3rd tier staff during upgrades and analyses of issues.
• Bringing an unused complaints system back into service to replace multiple shared spreadsheets, this streamlined customer handling processes allowing SLAs to be maintained with less effort.
• Introduced REST services to legacy applications allowing dealers to request updates to agreements instead of contacting the service centre, this reduced incoming dealer calls by 10%.

Sporting Index Ltd

A provider of sports spread betting fixture pricing information, software and services. The service is provided directly to the public and to other betting companies including William Hill, Betfred and Totes in the UK.

• Redevelopmment of "Connect" a B2B integration SDK used by clients (including William Hill and BetFred) to connect to Sporting Index systems. This included HTTP JSON based REST and RabbitMQ services. I redesigned the SDK from scratch whilst making no changes to the published API improving multi-threaded reliability. The majority of the system is based on core Java with the exceptions of Apache HTTP Components and RabbitMQ client libraries.
• Worked closely with the integration test team and pilot client in order to optimize system performance.
• The new design of the RabbitMQ module has been adopted by the .NET development team.

Monitise Plc

A company offering mobile payment and banking services to major financial institutions. Monitise was the largest mobile money specialist in the world at the time. They worked with over 300 of the worlds leading businesses and financial institutions in 4 continents, to make the most of the opportunities this creates.

• Here I was responsible for the development of email and SMS based alerts module based around Glassfish, ActiveMQ and Oracle DB. The client, Visa Europe, was after a means of instantly notifying clients of irregular or successful payments. The complete solution offered a complete payment and account management service to Visa clients across Europe.
• An associated project was the integration of RBS with Visa allowing instant person to person payments whether they have accounts with Visa or not, this was simply a matter of pluging in an Integration layer between RBS and the existing Visa Payments API. The other project I was involved with consisted of an alliance with Mobile Money Network which offers mobile based shop fronts to third parties including: Carphone Warehouse, Simply Tap and Thorntons.
• Being a small company I had to work very closely with the test teams helping them identify issues and provide solutions based around configuration or new code ensuring overall design is adhered to.
• I also worked with the performance and tuning team specificically around ActiveMq behaviour. This resulted in code changes and an upgrade to ActiveMq.

Atos Origin

Atos is a consultancy offering consultancy services to public sector projects.

• Development, build, configuration and support of multiple systems on Weblogic (WLS, OSB, BPM). This required the creation of a packaging system providing a standardised and replicable build process.
• Development was mostly based around the Weblogic OSB messaging engine. This part of the system parsed message content and business processes specified through JRules. The aim of the complete system was to automate UK visa processing including automated application checks.

Serco Limited

Like Atos, Serco is a public sector consultancy. They project involved immigration control legal services in addition to infrastructure project management.

• Deployment automation of multiple software products for security agencies based on standard messaging infrastructure (WebLogic 10.3, WebSphere MQ on Red Hat Entreprise 5). These was acheieved through a combination of Perl and shell scripting.
• The main product, an upgrade to a multi-agency system integration through EDI and XML (eGIF and CorDM RIMs) was developed in Java running on a combination of Websphere and Weblogic application servers. Unfortunately as the client cancelled the contract the role here changed from one of development to contract-exit management.
• My involvement was to carry out a complete software audit and review capacity planning to ensure existing systems are fully and correctly documented thus ensuring BAU operation of production environments. This involved full analysis of the contracted supplier's code base in order to allow the transition to in-house development teams and updating the DR/HA design and processes.

BT Design and BT Global Services

A global consultancy offering hosting solutions, software development, service management in addition to the usual management consultancy efforts. In this instance they were responsible for delivering a completely integrated patient care system across London and the South-West of England. The system allows clinicians, GPs, and appropriate support staff to follow a patient's progress and care paths.

• My role as system integration engineer meant providing analysis and technical support to meet NHS and in-house client expectations, this involved in-depth knowledge of business and technical requirements, analysing planned system enhancements to identify future development to help design, development, build and configuration teams asses any impact on interface / data migration and planned system behaviour / delivery.
• I was responsible for developing messaging sub-systems between the main application (EPR) and clinical/reporting systems in Java within Seebeyond e*Gate. I also developed automated deployment tools using ant and shell scripting to hand over to the client. It was necessary to work with the service management team in order to help disagnose problems and provide code fixes for next deployment phase, this was mostly in C++.
• As part of the product design and development process I provided consultancy services to clients helping them identify improvements to existing business systems and processes. This included assesing DR/HA and functional requirements in order to ensure continuity and QOS in production and client training systems.
• The development and deployment processes also involved building and configuring multiple format messaging systems through WebSphere MQ and e*Gate integration systems on HP-UX, Solaris and AIX with Oracle.

Cerner Limited

Cerner -like General Electric Healthcare which is covered below- offers patient management and billing systems. Although a smaller company than GE, it is very aggresive in it's timescales and overall quality of the service offered to it's clients.

• Here I acted as lead interface analyst lead for a large number of NHS clients including Queen Mary's, Barnet and Chase Farm, Barts and The London, and The Royal Free Hospitals. The messaging is based around XML (modelled on the HL7 RIM/MIM), X12 and EDIFACT. In order to roll out systems which match client's expectations and requirements I developed techniques to increase interface performance and optimize resource utilization, carrying out business process gap analysis, consulting clients on system usage, and identifying interface and data migration requirements and any impact on business workflows, interface and system behaviour.
• While working on the project I automated the deployment process on Websphere and configuration on the backend using a mixture of shell and Perl Scripting. These set of deployment scripts were then handed over to the client for ongoing maintenance and future releases.
• As part of the final product a full documentation suite had to be provided allowing handover to the client's service management teams. The documentation set included deployment and troubleshooting process guides, functional specifications and physical communications specifications.

General Electric UK

The Healthcare Systems division provides imagining, testing and clinical monitoring equipment, it also offers complete patient workflow management systems and consultancy services to public and private healthcare providers.

• The successful migration of most legacy systems for a number of Hospitals including: UCLH, Queen Mary's and Chelsea & Westminster onto a common platform which would act as the basis for london wide patient appoinment management and the access to a patient's medical history by authorised personnel. Acting as the lead interface analyst between the company's product (Centricity Enterprise) and national NHS databases (PDS, C&B) we developed the clinical messaging (HL7) and commissioning (PCT reporting) upgrade together with the messaging infrastructure to support this. This was on a combination of HP Non-Stop and Unix platforms.
• Development of clinical modules with EDI interfaces between central and third party external systems consisted of a database/backend system written in a mixture of C++, COBOL, and Enform. The corresponding user front-end subsystems which was written on C (on windows).
• Worked with the test team in order to develop a set of test tools and test scripts covering total system integration including data migration. Also trained a newly formed interfacing team which which allowed GE to provide greater customer coverage.

Chelsea & Westminster Healthcare

An NHS Trust offering public and private services providing a large number of specialties including: Paediatric & Neonatal Surgery, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, A&E, Burns Unit, Dermatology.

• The development and maintenance of clinical and patient booking modules using a mixture of C, COBOL and DataBasic. This was done in conjunction with clinicians and patient representative groups allowing the capture of information wihtin a constrained dataset.
• Data Migration from legacy systems including patient admin, A&E and pathology onto the Trust's core database involved the conversion of datasets and development of automated and repeatble tests. The test migration was run several times in order to improve the process, cleanse data and to test the migration process itself, each time the complete data set was migrated to ensure the final run would be as smooth and reliable as possible.
• System integration between the Trust's core system and ancilliary systems including pathology and analysis equipment. The integration was based on Seebeyond e*gate and implemented using a mixture of Scheme and Java. This work involved field level analysis of each system in order to identify any impact on clinical processes and third party systems.

Waterlow Publishing

A financial, legal and charity sector publishing group. Providing industry directories and financial data to clients ranging from legal firms to fund managers.

• Designed, developed and deployed a server-side system providing live annuity information and associated billing system. This service was then marketed to IFAs when providing information to their clients. It consisted of a Visual C++ frontend with Visual Basic middleware communicating with a Pick Database backend where annuity calculations were performed.
• Designed and developed database browsers for other company divisions providing charity sector information. These databases were sold to companies offering supporting services to UK based charities. The frontend was coded in Visual C++ with a Jet DB backend, the system was optimised in order to fit onto two floppy disks.
• Designed, developed, implemented and managed the helpdesk client support system supporting all our clients. This was a self contained Microsoft Access Application providing reporting functionality.