Curriculum Vitae

Mike Raynham

This CV is available in PDF, Word 97-2003, Open Office, and Markdown formats.

Summary

  • Diverse experience over 27 years, and currently working as a senior Perl developer. For six years prior to that, I was technical lead for a high capacity website: programming Perl, supporting Linux, Apache HTTP Server, nginx, HAProxy, MySQL, memcached and Gearman.

Employment

The Register

May 2017 to present (Senior Developer)

Senior Developer at The Register, a leading global online tech publication.

  • Using Modern Perl, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, along with MySQL and PostgreSQL to maintain and build both the public facing website and internal tools.

SpareRoom.co.uk

August 2011 to May 2017 (Technical Lead)

SpareRoom.co.uk is one of the busiest flatsharing websites in the UK.

  • Introduced Perl coding standards, code reviews, unit testing, and procedures for testing and refactoring legacy code.
  • Created standardised development and testing environments using VirtualBox.
  • Migrated version control system from Subversion to Git.
  • Moved advert photo storage from a physical server to Amazon S3 with an ELB and EC2 front-end.
  • Improved site performance and scalability by implementing memcached and Gearman.
  • Moved core systems to a new data centre, with servers provisioned by Cobbler, Kickstart and Puppet.
  • Migrated core database from MySQL 4.1.22 to Percona Server 5.6.
  • Upgraded Perl from 5.8.8 to 5.20.3.
  • Used HAProxy for front-end and database load balancing.
  • Used Perl with Rex and Pinto to create a fully automated release process.
  • Led a project to move the website’s core search feature from MySQL to Sphinx Search.
  • Improved recruitment procedures and introduced technical tests.

Self Employment

August 2005 to August 2011

  • Web development and IT support for small businesses.
  • Created database driven websites with custom content management systems.
  • Sites built with Linux, Apache, nginx, MySQL, PHP and Perl (with the Catalyst MVC framework and DBIx::Class).
  • The development of installation procedures for a Microsoft Silverlight IIS complaints system that had been designed for local councils by a software development company in Wilmslow.
  • The development of an application for Reed Professional Services to extract information from their accounting system, create PDF remittance advice notes, and email these directly to contractors. It was written in MS Visual Basic Express, and used an SQLite database.

Cheshire Building Society

July 2001 to April 2003 (Technical Support Programmer)

April 2003 to August 2005 (Infrastructure & Security Analyst)

  • Part of a small third level support team responsible for the all the back end IT systems.
  • Testing and maintaining the disaster recovery plan.
  • Design, installation and support for all intrusion detection, firewall and other security systems.
  • Call-out support for all critical systems.
  • Providing training and support to the first and second level support teams, and the Core Systems Development team.

Projects and responsibilities included:

  • Design, implementation and support of the company’s anti-virus software and procedures.
  • Design, development and maintenance of a bespoke VB 6.0 application to install security patches and application updates, configure software, and provide system information logs for all the company’s PCs.
  • The migration from Novell GroupWise 5.0 to Microsoft Exchange 2000 and Outlook 2002.
  • The development of a bespoke application to automatically create and configure Exchange/Outlook profiles for users.
  • The design and installation of a Microsoft Active Directory environment.
  • The installation, configuration and roll-out of the RIM Blackberry messaging system.

Building Design Partnership

July 1996 to July 2001 (Third-Level Technical Support)

  • Technical support for first and second level IT support teams.
  • Support and coordination of BDP’s anti-virus software and security systems. within the practice.

Projects and responsibilities included:

  • The roll-out of Windows NT 4.0 and Windows NT 4.0 Server to all BDP offices.
  • Testing and certification of all BDP’s software for Year 2000 compliance.
  • Development of Windows NT Mandatory Profiles, System Policies and logon scripts.

Expert Systems Design

July 1995 TO July 1996 (Developer & On-Site Support)

Atkins Odlin & Partners

April 1992 to July 1995 (Computer Administrator & AutoCAD Technician)

Buzzwords

Perl, MySQL, Apache, nginx, Linux, Git, Vim, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, VirtualBox, AWS, S3, EC2, Shell Scripting, Sphinx Search, PostgreSQL, Windows, Puppet, Cobbler, Kickstart, memcached, Gearman, Varnish.