July 1988 - May 1996
Upon graduating from The University of Hertfordshire (formerly The Hatfield Polytechnic) in 1988 I started my engineering career with Parker Hannifin. Parker Hannifin is one of the world's largest manufacturers of motion and control equipment supplying systems and components to their industrial customers around the globe.
I spent nearly eight years working for Parker Hannifin at Watford as their Electro-Hydraulic Systems Engineer covering the UK and parts of Europe. During this time I graduated from the University of Bath with a Masters Degree in Fluid Power Systems. I obtained associate membership to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and sat on a number of industry and standards related committees.
I found the work that I did there to be incredibly interesting and varied. Working as an consultant applications engineer for their industrial customers I became intimately acquainted with many different industrial applications and processes. From remote oil and gas separation on the sea bed to refuelling rockets; from making tiny die cast model cars to forging parabolic suspension springs for Freightliner trucks; from controlling the lock gates on the historic Alexandria Dock in Hull to pre-flight testing of Rolls Royce Trent engines to give just a taste. A couple of other projects that are visible on Google Maps are the Hover Speed Sea Cat Link Span in Calias and the Frigate Simulation Rolling Platform at Boscombe Down.
May 1996 - June 1998
Due to my successes in Watford I was asked by Parker Hannifin to join the newly formed Electro-Mechanical Division based in Pool, Dorset. The task here was to develop this fledgling business into a fully functional and profitable business unit by developing, manufacturing and marketing a new range of mechanical products to complement the electronic drivers and controllers already manufactured by the parent division.
This was a very exciting time for me as it allowed me to gain much more managerial and marketing experience. As the primary Marketing Engineer I was personally involved in catalogue production, price listing and all business communications. During this time I wrote a number of software packages used for the design and selection of a range of mechanical actuators - the first time I was actually paid for writing software!
I also completed the first year of a Chartered Institute of Marketing, Certificate in Marketing course and received a distinction for my work in Business Communications.
June 1998 - November 2003
This was the period of time when the internet was gaining critical mass and fear of the Y2K crash was making software developers very hard to find (perhaps they were all hiding). Because of this I received an offer from Four Masters Systems Ltd, a small software consultancy firm to join them as a Web Developer and Software Engineer working for clients such as The Royal Mail, Europe Car, Diageo and Panasonic.
This work was very exciting as this was just at the time when the internet was starting to emerge as the global phenomena it is today. It was a time of rapid technological progress, exponential growth and meteoric importance of the internet which now we would all find it hard to do without. I had the exceptional good fortune to be at the cutting edge of this with a major multi-national corporation as the primary designer and software engineer for their entire public facing web based services; and I did this for a period of five years.
November 2003 - July 2005
When Panasonic finally decided to take their internet work in-house I was left looking for a new opportunity. I was lucky enough to find such an opportunity in the guise of a company with the odd name of OD2. OD2, or On Demand Distribution were white label internet Music Company set up and owned by Peter Gabriel, the onetime front man for Genesis, solo artist and founder of WoMaD. For the first two years it was very much a matter of eking out a hand to mouth existence in this industry. Perhaps OD2 was just a little too far ahead of the game but at that time the internet was not really the place where people were prepared to pay to download music, even legal music. But we signed deals with Microsoft (MSN), Coca-Cola and my old fried Panasonic and we managed to keep going one deal at a time. Then we were spotted by Loudeye, but that's another story...
July 2005 - February 2007
Loudeye acquired OD2 in a friendly takeover in the middle of 2005. Loudeye were a company the specialised in encoding and transcoding digital media for a number of US companies. Then one day they secured deals for a number of major retailers and a phone operator in the United States to supply complete turnkey digital music solutions - including websites. Since they had no experience of this they approached OD2. From our perspective this was a very good deal. We obtained £60 million in cash to pay off our creditors, put some money in the bank and secured a number of major new clients. Not the least important to us was the deal that Loudeye had done with AT&T which allowed us to work very closely with the mobile phone industry. This was an area that we were keen to get into for a number of years but were finding it difficult to secure a partner that would fund the necessary development. Suddenly the future was very bright.
February 2007 - ?
But it was not Orange that was our vehicle into the European mobile phone industry. Due to un-reconcilable internal engineering issues between the developers in the US, Loudeye failed to deliver an acceptable site to any of their clients in the time required. The US division of Loudeye went into receivership and the UK division was put up for sale (again) as a going concern.
That was when Nokia knocked on the door. Contrary to popular belief, Nokia is not a mobile phone company; mobile phones are simply the product that Nokia make at the moment. Nokia started out as a lumber producer before they moved into rubber products such as boots and car tyres. They got involved in small home appliances in the 50's and 60's and finally moved in to the mobile phone arena. It's hard to believe that a company that used to make wood and rubber boots could compete with the major electronics manufacturers of the world. Not only compete though, Nokia now dominate the world in mobile phones with an estimated one billion Nokia phone is use today (that's one in every six people in the world have a Nokia phone).
Nokia's plan is to move in to the software and services area in a very big way. We see the future of both the software and the hardware is in solutions to problems. The hardware and the software working together seamlessly to solve the problems that is important to the people using them. Nokia already have the hardware side of this equation cornered so it's time to focus on the software side of things.
For the last two and a half years we've been busy re-writing the entire ASP.net based web site as a collection of SOA components using a REST based architectual design pattern. The result is the World Leading Ovi Music Site. This on its own has been very challenging but to make things even more interesting we decided to adopt the Agile methodology, in particular XP and Scrum.
Although the adoption of XP and Scrum was initially very daunting, I firmly believe that this has been the primary reason for our successful migration of the site to the new architecture. Although there were a lot of changes to the way we work and the way we think as developers, the improvement in estimation and code quality are unparalleled. The traditional 'end-game' of weeks of debugging and code fixing before the mad rush to get a big monolithic code base in to live is gone. We work at a much steadier pace now and spend very little time fixing bugs. We spend a lot of time writing automated tests but these tests are what fix the code in the first place as well as making sure it stays fixed when we make changes.
As part of the Agile transition I trained as a Scrum Master and received my Certified Scrum Master certificate from the Scrum Alliance.