Some stuff I do and some stuff I did
Currently, I am a Principal Consultant at Simple Machines. As a consultant and software engineer, I work with and utilise the best technologies that will help clients solve the problems they present to us. I mainly do cool and fun stuff with Scala and its multitude of open-source libraries and frameworks. Almost everything we build is cloud-based using platforms like Amazon Web Services and environments like Docker. And in a world of big and streaming data, we also utilise platforms like Kafka as backbones for our fault-tolerant and distributed applications.Previously, I was a Platform Software Engineer at BiblioCommons. I did stuff with Java — mainly building and maintaining Web applications and Servlet-based software (deployed mainly in Tomcat) — with a mix of other stuff (Gradle, Hibernate, Spring (DI, MVC), Google Guice and Guava, Ehcache, Memcached, ActiveMQ, Jersey, RestEasy, Hystrix, RxJava, a scattering of Apache libraries, and the list goes on...). I also occasionally did some stuff with Ruby on Rails, JRuby, and JavaScript.
Before that, I was a postdoc at the National University of Ireland, Galway where I did stuff with Java (Hadoop, Mahout, Storm, Jetty, OpenRDF), JavaScript (Node.js, Backbone.js, JQuery, Three.js), SPARQL, and HTML. There was also a sprinkle of Python here and there.
And before that, I studied and researched applications of logic programming — specifically answer set programming — in conjunction with theories in access control and information security (in particular with XML documents).
Want to know more? Check out my LinkedIn profile.
Sometimes I write stuff other than just code
- "So, what exactly will you do next?" - My PhD Story
- An Actor-based User Similarity Recommender: An Experiment with the Akka Toolkit
- What we fear: An opinion on why some software developers don't like the "Everyone Should Learn to Code" philosophy
- StreamRule: A Nonmonotonic Stream Reasoning System for the Semantic Web
- Implementation of a SPARQL Integrated Recommendation Engine for Linked Data with Hybrid Capabilities
- A Formal Language for XML Authorisations Based on Answer Set Programming and Temporal Interval Logic Constraints
- A Formal Language for Specifying Complex XML Authorisations with Temporal Constraints
Some other stuff about me, in brevity
- I've been playing around with computers since the beginning of the 90's and have been programming for more than 15 years.
- I hava a Diploma in Software Engineering, a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, and an Honours and PhD in the same field. I studied in Canada (my home and native land) and in Australia.
- Before moving permanently to Australia in 2016, I also lived in Ireland and did some postdoctoral work at the National University of Ireland, Galway. I'm originally from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and first moved to Australia temporarily in 2006.
- Outside of computer science, software, programming, and the vast wealth of information that the Internet and social media beckon me with (i.e. Reddit & Twitter), I also enjoy listening to music, (re)watching a ton of movies, and playing video games (when I can find the time). When I'm not in front of a screen, you'll find me spending time with my wife and family in the real world.