Andrew's Stuff

Andrew Gillard

Personal Details

Postal address
redacted from
Web copy

Date of Birth: 7th February 1987

Work Experience

Also check out my portfolio and github profile: https://andrewgillard.com/portfolio, https://github.com/aziraphale

National Centre for Research Methods – Web Developer – Feb-Oct 2014; 2013; 2012

I was brought in for several one-or-two-week periods over the course of two years to aid NCRM’s sole developer as larger pieces of work needed to be done. I then returned for a 7-month contract to coincide with the renewal of their funding and development and launch of a new website design and significant new “portal” section.

  • http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/
  • Development of a PhoneGap/Apache Cordova app for Android and iOS devices
  • Authored “portal” section’s authentication layer, using a third-party authentication provider and falling back to a standard local authentication system
  • Instigated an improved development environment, including full use of git and strict separation of live and development servers; subsequently used this system to push the revamped site from the development server to the live server with minimal downtime
  • Configured a new RHEL VM as a Web server on which to host an upgrade of their existing installation of EPrints, a Perl-powered Web application
  • Provided support, and helped manage a group of 20+ student helpers, at the 2014 NCRM Research Methods Festival

MAXX Design Ltd. – Web Developer – 2012-2014

  • Backend and frontend development for dozens of client websites, mostly built on an in-house CMS, including an informational guide for the Breakthrough Breast Cancer charity which has since won four separate awards: one from the Association of Medical Research Charities, one from the British Medical Association and two from the Interactive Media Awards
  • Maintained approximately a dozen WordPress blogs, writing custom automation scripts and plugins where necessary
  • Supported, maintained and improved internal network; organised upgrade of office Internet connection; set up seamless, automatic failover of office Internet connection; supported other staff with PC/Mac problems
  • Sat in on interviews of job candidates; conducted technical portion of interviews
  • Handled support calls/emails from clients and, as appropriate, assisted them, made minor website changes, quoted for larger changes, or referred them to my manager
  • Provided technical input to initial client meetings regarding new work
  • Provided quotes on specifications for new work
  • Successfully pushed for use of version control (git) throughout; subsequently set up git on all client sites and mentored other developers on use thereof
  • Heavily liaised with sysadmin regarding hosting servers, hosting network, client domains, etc.
  • Planned and oversaw migration from aging local Postfix mail server to Google Apps
  • Designed & built new PCs for new hires

Craig Brass Systems Ltd. – Lead Web Developer – 2007-2012

  • Responsible for choice of tools & libraries used in projects
  • Designed architecture of software projects, plus large, complex relational database schema
  • Implemented majority of functionality of projects including extensive PHP framework
  • Created a base graphical design (HTML/CSS) for a dedicated graphic designer to work from
  • Managed small team of developers (inc. reviewing code for style, stability and security requirements)

Certification

  • Zend Certified PHP Engineer (PHP 5) – Candidate ID ZEND014075 – June 2010

Education

University of GlamorganOctober 2005 – June 2009

Computer Studies BSc (Hons) First Class

Uckfield Community Technology CollegeSeptember 2003 – June 2005

A-Level (June 2005) Computing (AQA)A
Electronics (AQA)A
Physics (Edexcel)D
AS-Level (June 2004) Mathematics (AQA)D

Technical Skills

Web Development

Very proficient with:

  • PHP (5.3-5.5; PHP-FIG PSR-1, 2, 4; PDO, SPL, full OOP; both Web and shell/daemon use)
  • MySQL (normalisation; transactions; relational constraints; views; stored procedures)
  • HTML (XHTML 1.1, HTML 5; fully-compliant, accessible and semantic; all hand-written, no WYSIWYG editors used)
  • HTML 5 (FileReader; offline Web apps; geolocation; new input types; data attributes; Web Storage)
  • Mobile website development (for Android, iOS, etc.); Responsive Web Design; high-DPI imagery
  • CSS (including CSS 3; Bootstrap; LESS; SCSS/Compass)
  • JavaScript (with and without jQuery and jQuery UI; Ajax; JSON)
  • Regular expressions (PCRE)
  • Web security, password storage, etc. (full OWASP Top 10 coverage; strong focus on security)

Also experienced with:

  • Smarty
  • CodeIgniter; Zend Framework; Cordova/PhoneGap
  • Apache (mod_rewrite, other modules; general configuration)
  • SOAP; XML
  • APIs (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Google Maps)
  • Payment gateway integration (PayPal, Google Checkout, WorldPay)
  • Adobe Photoshop

Other Programming Experience

  • Java (including Android device development)
  • Visual Basic .NET and C# .NET
  • C++ (with and without Qt)
  • Bash scripts; NWScript

Development Tools

  • IDEs (JetBrains PhpStorm, NuSphere PhpED, Zend Studio, Eclipse, Visual Studio)
  • Version control systems (Git, Subversion, Mercurial)
  • Package management (Composer; Bower)

System Administration

  • Windows (8, 7, XP; Server 2003, 2008)
  • Linux (Ubuntu, Ubuntu Server; CentOS, RHEL)

Hobbies

In my free time I can usually be found on a handful of IRC networks, playing various video games, reading books – especially Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series – or watching TV. During the summer months I spend a great deal of time in my garden tending to the plants and harvesting the fruit, which is something that I find both enjoyable and relaxing. The garden also provides a perfect opportunity for me to indulge one of my other interests: photography. Lately I have also been making improvements to the open source Quassel IRC client that I use on my Android phone and have had code merged into the upstream repository where it can benefit a wider audience. I also actively maintain an IRC “bot” written in PHP and have been developing a Web interface to the logs stored by the Quassel distributed IRC client.

Work Reference

References for National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), MAXX Design Ltd. and Craig Brass Systems Ltd. are available on request.

Last updated: 7 Jun, 2019