- mikeraynham@gmail.com | +44 7813 307561
- Diverse experience over 32 years, and currently working as Tech Lead and senior Perl developer. For six years prior to that, I was technical lead for a high capacity website.
Tech Lead and Senior Developer at The Register, a leading global online tech publication.
- Worked towards improved coding standards, code reviews, and the requirement for more comprehensive automated testing.
- Introduced Apache Kafka to help with the process of breaking apart monolithic code and work towards a more event-driven architecture.
- Introduced Debezium to enable replication across database systems and to provide a mechanism for Change Data Capture (CDC) and Extract, Transform, Load (ETL).
- Oversaw and worked on a project to move some services from bare-metal servers to a more resilient and scalable cloud-based architecture.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache HTTP Server, Apache Kafka, CSS, Gearman, Git, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), HTML, JavaScript, Linux, MySQL, Perl, PostgreSQL, Shell Scripting, Sphinx Search, Vim, VirtualBox, memcached, nginx.