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Douglas Squirrel Age
34, married Clean, full
UK driving license American
with full settlement in UK (no work restrictions) British
citizenship pending |
5 Branden
Drive, Knutsford, Cheshire, WA16 8EJ. +44 7812 995
456 ds@douglassquirrel.com |
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Experience |
2002-present London
and Manchester Chief Technology Officer (Nov 2002 - present). Provided technical leadership
during sale and delivery of four major projects: *
A three-year build-and-operate
contract with a consortium of eight global investment banks for a trade-ideas
application. During bid, ensured youDevise stood out from competitors by
presenting working prototype and detailed technical architecture. During
requirements and build, continued to build application with team of four
coders, leading regular reviews with customers to evolve the specification
and simultaneously training coders, none of whom had written commercial Java
code before. Currently run development team of six developers plus QA team of
five part-time testers, providing mentoring, training, and architectural
direction as they extend the application and move to a more agile development
model. Application now in production at four banks and several hedge funds,
with over 700 users. Monthly releases provide many new features and provide
significant advantage in active market containing at least three significant
competitors. *
A four-contractor, two-year
contract for a billing implementation at a FTSE 100 company (United
Utilities). Sold performance of product to skeptical IT staff. During build,
consulted on performance, database changes, and application design with
developers, and led tactical squads of 2-6 people to rescue late
deliverables. Saw project through to end of engagement; application is now in
production for 3 million water customers. *
A two-firm contract for a
fund-of-hedge-funds product, scheduled for production in March 2006 after
five months' development. Supervise team of two developers and three business
analysts. Team use agile development methods, providing weekly
production-quality releases, regular client feedback sessions to review these
releases, and full unit-test coverage to reduce defects. *
Ongoing internal project for a
platform used to rapidly develop and deploy financial applications. Platform,
built entirely with open-source software, scales to thousands of simultaneous
users and includes o
several flavours of single
sign-on o
agent processes with automated
failover o
alerting for failures, errors,
and performance violations o
database-agnostic object-relational
mapping o
one-click
build and release management o
pluggable
interfaces for email and market data 1999-2002 San Francisco and London Project
Manager (Oct 2000 - Nov 2002). Planned and
executed complex, record-breaking billing application benchmark, managing
team of 4-6 developers to manufacture 3 terabytes of artificial data,
simulate 2400 concurrent end-users, and execute ten batch processing steps.
After three months' preparation, tested and tuned for six weeks in
performance centre, organising and motivating team to work 24 hours a day,
seven days a week in shifts. Met all benchmark targets to customer's
satisfaction. Repeated similar, smaller benchmark for another customer's
application, then managed several performance, coding, and testing projects
for customers in Manchester, London, and New York simultaneously. Software
Developer (Jun 1999 - Sep 2000). Improved integration, quality, and
usability of data-feeding and data-validation components of enterprise
application. Revised C code to produce 33% improvement in speed of data
imports. Constructed and supervised nightly integration testing process for
development teams in two cities on Sun and Windows systems. Won company-wide
award for precision execution. 1997, 1998 Guest Scientist. Invented and analysed number-theoretic algorithms.
Implemented these algorithms using C++ as part of an integrated number theory
library. |
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Skills
and Qualities |
Executive Describing revolutionary technology in business-friendly
terms Presenting strategic technology options to Board of
Directors Negotiating complex contract terms involving several
contractors and customers Advising senior management on
industry trends and best practices Managerial Evolving team processes to include agile methods without
losing productivity Training new team members to use unfamiliar tools Retaining high-skilled but high-strung super-coders while
gently improving ability to work with others Designing fully automated processes that guarantee quality
on every check-in Turning around a troubled project by making small gains
quickly Tracking project progress in a simple and transparent way
to help customers set sensible goals and cut scope to make targets Technical Languages: Java, C, C++, HTML, Perl,
PHP, SQL, UML, XML, XSLT Operating systems: Microsoft Windows,
Unix (Solaris, Linux, and others) Application tools: Oracle, MySQL,
Hibernate, Tomcat Development tools: NetBeans, Ant,
CruiseControl, Emma, FindBugs Personal Speaking and writing German Cricket umpire in Cheshire County
League |
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Education |
1997-1999
University of California at Berkeley Master's and candidate's degrees in
mathematics. National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. Thesis on computing
kernels of integer matrices. 1995-1997
Reed College, Portland, Oregon Bachelor of Arts degree in
mathematics. Phi Beta Kappa
honours society. Thesis on computing reciprocity
symbols in number fields. |
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Portfolio
of design and project-management products available on request |