Michael Joseph⚓️
Senior Software Developer / Team Lead⚓️
Summary⚓️
Senior Software Developer with an emphasis on maintaining efficient development teams using open-source development methodologies.
Documentation culture, developer productivity tooling, continuous integration and deployment and automated security patches are amongst my weaponry and research interests.
Experience⚓️
Team Lead @ Maple Syrup Media / Quidco 2016 - 2021⚓️
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RST team member responsible for support and onboarding whitelabel and API integration customers.
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Team Lead various teams supporting the rollout of the microservices platform.
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Developed tooling to reduce variability and increase the efficiency of our deployment and microservice versioning processes.
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Introduced cookiecutter templates for rapid rollout of new Laravel microservices.
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Introduced ADRs and RFCs for documenting our evolving technology best practices.
Senior Software Developer @ Intellection Software 2014 - 2016⚓️
I was part of the core team responsible for:
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administering and configuring production and development clusters
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improving application deployment and continuous integration systems
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general AWS administration
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supporting Ruby On Rails web application developers
Systems Engineer; Services Team Lead @ Yola 2010 - 2014⚓️
Built out the Python Services API layer as part of the distributed architecture roadmap.
Moved to a senior role with slightly more focus on architecture discussions and code reviews and assisted the PHP and Java practices supporting the SiteBuilder and published website components.
Senior Software Developer @ Sadalbari Open Software 2008 - 2010⚓️
Java consultant to large financial and insurance businesses based in Johannesburg. I reviewed and recommended changes to their JVM configuration to meet the scaling needs of their internal applications.
I performed ad-hoc performance tuning as well as periodic performance reviews.
The periodic performance reviews occur in the context of a long-term performance improvement plan and comprise setting appropriate performance levels, continual improvement and monitoring of the application's performance in the load-testing environment as well as detailed application server and application analysis (garbage collection logging and subsequent garbage collection algorithm tuning, heap generation size calibration, database query analysis and improvement, application server pool size monitoring and tuning).
The ad-hoc review and performance tuning exercises involved debugging error conditions that occurred under high load conditions. The process followed consisted of hypothesising the cause of the exception in a load-balanced multi-tier environment (Tomcat web application, JBoss EJB application server cluster, database cluster and Mainframe integration), conducting appropriate experiments in a load-testing environment and recommending code changes and server software parameter tuning.
Senior Software Developer; Open Source Business Unit Manager @ AdaptIT 2007 - 2008⚓️
Technical Lead of the Open Source Business Unit software development team. We built and maintained the eThekwini Municipality Internet and Intranet sites.
I was promoted to Open Source Business Unit Manger in 2008.
Roles⚓️
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Technical leadership - troubleshooting issues, talking developers through possible implementation choices, improving technical skills through code reviews and dissemination of development best practices and procedures
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Software Application Architecture and Design- constructing high level architecture representations of proposed systems, decomposing systems into Conceptual, Logical and Deployment views, development task generation and estimation
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Business and Functional Analysis
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Project management
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Technical documentation
Senior Software Developer @ Jam Warehouse 2002 - 2007⚓️
Software development team lead on PHP, C# and Python development projects.
Projects⚓️
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Software Development Lead responsible for the design, management and initial implementation of KnowledgeTree, an open source web-based document management system. I was the release manager for the initial SourceForge releases.
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I led the Woolworths BrandDirector implementation in C# (proprietary web application using a extensive in-house RAD framework).
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Lead developer for ongoing maintenance and development of the eThekwini Municipality Internet and intranet portals. I managed and mentored the development team.
Senior Developer @ iTouch Labs 2002 - 2002⚓️
I was a senior member of the iTouch TAS, the internal research and development company providing services to the operational companies of the iTouch Group.
We provided developer support services, localisable infrastructure applications and platform level management services.
Projects⚓️
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Responsible for the design and implementation of an FTP Interface to the CMS.
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Deployment team member responsible for the installation, configuration, testing and modification of the CMS WebSMS application for iTouch South Africa. Created generic builds (and contributed to installation documentation) for ease of installation into other iTouch operations.
Software Developer @ iTouch Ireland 2000 - 2001⚓️
I became a senior member of the development team, providing a bridge between development and operations as well as contributing to troubleshooting performance and deployment issues.
My primary focus was the development of applications in PHP, Java and the custom IVR language 4Voice to support iTouch Ireland's mobile content services.
I represented iTouch Ireland at a database modelling workshop where we were tasked with designing a unified database model for all iTouch operations.
Software Developer @ Vodacom 1999 - 2000⚓️
I was responsible for the development and maintenance of one of the network performance management systems in operation at Vodacom. The system was used and supported on a national scale, and was implemented by an OLAP database - Seagate Holos v.7.
The system collected network performance statistics from the Vodacom mobile network infrastructure, parsed the data into formats compatible with Holos, and generated data cubes for presentation to the performance analyst user base.
During my time at Vodacom, the data sources were migrated from flat text files to an Oracle 8 database, and the performance cubes generated by querying the database.
As the sole developer, I also managed the development schedule and maintained associated user and technical documentation.
IT Specialist @ Telkom 1999 - 1999⚓️
I was responsible for the development (in Visual Basic 6.0) and maintenance of a national Hotspot Centre fault logging and access network rehabilitation program, for the Access Network Maintenance Department (North Eastern Region).
The application provided input screens for the capture of fault information, stored this information in a Microsoft Access database, and provided querying and reporting capabilities.