Luke WilliamsCurriculum Vitae

w: http://www.red-root.com
e: luke[at]red-root.com
t: @luke_redroot

About Me

I'm a senior full-stack developer with over a decade's experience building web products. I'm most comfortable when I get to touch all aspects of the stack, whether its building a strategy for an autoscaling backend service or writing a modular CSS framework for a user-facing product, and everything in between. I am a fervent believer in developing projects in the best possible way, making sure they are scalable, robust and simple for other developers to work on.

When I'm not sitting in front of a screen, you will often find me strumming a guitar, playing back row for various rugby sides, or eating copious amounts of sushi.

Skillset

Strong experience developing with Ruby, Node.js and PHP and corresponding frameworks, including Rails, Sinatra, Express
Strong front-end skills covering Javascript, HTML(5) and CSS(3), responsive web design and front-end optimization
Experience developing with various data stores, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcache, LevelDB, MongoDB and Redshift

Experience with Linux server management and AWS cloud services
A meticulous eye for usability and accessibility best practices
Accomplished web design skills and appreciation of good design and the use of conventions and affordances
Use of Subversion and Git for version control

Experience

Neon Adventures/ Senior/Lead Engineer

April 2016 - Present

Working on:
- acts.kindness.org. My work covered all aspects of the stack including Terraform based infrastructure and monitoring in AWS, Rails and Sidekiq backend and React & Redux Saga frontend.
- paws.com

RefME/ Technical Lead

March 2015 - April 2016

As well as being a senior full-stack developer at RefME, from September I also became Technical Lead, defining technical strategy and architecture decisions across our various production services. As part of this I was also product owner and scrum master of the Productivity and Data team of 5 developers, working to make our data-driven decisions and feature delivery easier.

Scramble Internet Group/ Senior Developer

March 2014 - February 2015

Scramble combined leading technology and detailed data analysis to manage large-scale advertising campaigns and build products. My role at Scramble covers the full stack, working with high traffic distributed tracking systems, building internal dashboards, tools for data analysis with AWS and planning architecture of new products. Scramble was spun out from Forward Internet Group in early 2014.

Forward Internet Group/ Developer

August 2011 - March 2014

Full stack web development, working with big data and various languages and paradigms. The team I worked in became Scramble Internet Limited.

FactoryMedia / Senior Developer

May 2012 - August 2013

I joined the FactoryMedia digital team soon after Forward acquired them in February 2012. I used my previous experience with Wordpress to lead the technical migration of 25+ separate Wordpress sites onto a custom WP platform, allowing us to roll out features in days rather than months. I also optimised the deployment and caching strategies, integrating autoscaling to eliminate downtime and creating a custom page caching plugin which increased cache hit rate by 15%, helping us to scale to 10 million page views a month.

University of Kent Webteam / Part-Time Web Developer

May 2009 - July 2011

Working as part of a diverse team of other students, my role on the University of Kent webteam was primarily the development and maintenance of internal sites. The included helping to build and run an Adobe Dreamweaver and PHP based Content Management System for the 20,000+ pages on the University website, developing a robust and secure 'drag-and-drop' web form building service, as well as building numerous snippets to allow publishers to deliver rich and interesting content with no knowledge of web code.

Active Webdezign / Lead Web Developer

July 2007 - July 2008

After three weeks work experience the previous summer, Active Webdezign offered me a full-time position for my gap year. Due to my knowledge of CSS and semantic HTML I initially began in a purely front-end role, but my prowess in server-side programming soon led to me being the lead developer at the company, often leading other programmers in group projects. The experience I gained here was invaluable in helping me move from a hobbyist PHP programmer into a confident website architect, learning to use and manipulate existing systems such as Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress, as well as studying important web practices.

Red Root / Freelance Work

2006 - Present

I have completed numerous freelance projects outside of my employment. These include my own site, numerous Wordpress-based sites for sports clubs, as well as developing UR!KA, a social inspiration site in 2011.

Education

University of Kent

Sept 2008 - June 2011

BSc Multimedia Technology & Design - 1st Class

3rd XV and 2nd XV Rugby Captain, Rugby Club Committee Members (2 Years)

Mill Hill School

Sept 2002 - June 2007

9 GCSEs: Maths (A*), English Language (A), English Literature(A*), French(A), Chemistry(A), Biology(A), Physics(A*), Design Technology(A), History(A*)

3 A-Levels: Maths (A), ICT (A), Chemistry (A)