Neil Smith

Since starting contracting in January 2015 I have been in continuous employment. Most recently, since May 2015, in an ongoing contract at Grass Roots Group, Wendover, Bucks. Here I have been solely responsible for maintaining and extending a collection of applications managing consumer incentives and rewards for clients including RAC, EE and More Than. The apps are based on Zend Framework 2 combined with Angular 1.x front end and a combination of MySQL and MongoDB databases. Tasks have included enhancements to consumer-facing, admin and reporting functions as well as improving and troubleshooting legacy code.

Working as the lead PHP developer on highly complex applications dealing with automotive data. I inherited a large amount of undocumented legacy code, built on a proprietary MVC framework, which I was responsible for refactoring, documenting, maintaining and extending. Also introduced and implemented Git version control using Atlassian Stash server, and have been involved with mentoring a junior developer.

Working for a digital agency with a small team of principally front-end developers on a variety of projects. These included custom PHP/MySQL web application development plus WordPress integration and extension. I have also augmented my own front-end development skills, focusing on the construction of responsive websites utilising HTML5, jQuery and CSS3. During this time I have also gained experience of iOS app development.

Worked as part of a team maintaining and developing a proprietary, LAMP-based platform, built to serve dynamic mobile websites and content in high volumes, deliver SMS messages and manage billing via third party providers and aggregators. A large part of the job comprised the integration of a variety of APIs, plus the development of new modules and web services to provide additional functionality. Equally important was the troubleshooting and maintenance of legacy parts of the system, some of which were originally developed using procedural PHP4 code and with varying standards of execution and documentation.

Developing and participating in web design and development projects, both for design and marketing agencies and direct clients, as part of in-house teams and from my home office/studio. In this period I improved my back- and front-end web development skills, working on websites for, among others, Haringtons Hairdressers, Prince Sports Equipment and Hearing Dogs for the Deaf.