# About Me
Hey, I'm AJ. I'm a Software Engineer with a keen interest in platform engineering and development. I live in Manchester, England with my partner Karina, Daughter Isabelle and springer spaniels Obi and Loki. I work remotely at the Entain Group within the Platform Engineering team for an In-house gaming studio, CR Games. Over the last 12+ years I have been lucky enough to work on multiple interesting projects within both the Telecoms and Interactive Gaming industries. Away from work my hobbies and interests include Motorsport, Motorbikes, Weight Lifting and Mountain Biking.
# Personal Projects
My current personal project is a gamified fitness and gym tracking app, It's in the early stages of design at the moment but I hope to have something available publicly very shortly.
# Personal Goals
I believe it is important to set goals for your own self improvement, With that in mind I try to always be working towards one goal in each professional discipline - my current goals for 2022 are:
Improve knowledge and understanding of dev ops practices, with a focus on:
- Rapid deployment of development and testing servers using Vagrant,
- Ensuring easily reproducable and scalable systems using Ansible provisioning,
- Continous software delivery via a pipeline manager such as Jenkins or Travis
Gain additional experience building backend projects with a focus on improving skills within languages other than PHP:
- NodeJS
- Python
Build upon the foundations of Frontend Design
- Convert this site to use Nuxt.js!
# Work History & Key Projects
# Entain Group PLC (2018 - Present)
- Management of multiple large scale datacentre migrations
- Platform optimisation & redesign resulting in both improved performance and easier scalability
- Ground up design & development of a bespoke backoffice customer support system built upon a PHP (Lumen Framework) backend API and Javascript (vueJS) front end application to meet the needs of our internal customer support teams.
- Design & Development of an internal compliance monitoring & reporting system built using PHP (Laravel Framework) replacing an antiquated spreadsheet based system resulting in improved compliance monitoring and increased audit success rates.
- Design, Development & Maintainence of multiple 3rd party integration projects.
# Data Messaging & Communications Ltd (2011 - 2018)
- Researching & Developing new product lines
- Building & Maintaining relationships with new and existing key suppliers and clients
- Bespoke software and hardware solution design and implementation for new and existing clients
- Design & Implementation of the companies first physical datacentre presence