Phone – 07967 33 28 33 Email – finch.dave@gmail.com
Dave’s current project will be finishing mid April at which point he will be looking for an exciting and challenging contract role based in the Manchester area.
Dave is an IT professional with over 15 years commercial experience and extensive development, team lead experience.
For the past eight years most of his roles have involved designing/architecting and implementing J2EE/Java based solutions using Stripes, JSF, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, EJB, JMS, various application servers and databases. He also has experience with dozens of third party APIs. Despite the bias towards Java technologies in his recent roles, Dave has managed to keep his knowledge of Microsoft technologies current through the use of C# & ASP .Net
Experienced with all aspects of the project lifecycle using various methodologies. Happy to communicate at all levels from sponsors to users and producing requirement and design specifications using.
Very comfortable in various roles including team lead with experience leading teams of up to 25.
Good knowledge of numerous business sectors including banking and standards such as accessibility.
Java (incl. GWT JSF, JPA, Hibernate, Spring, J2EE – EJB1-3, Struts, JSP, JMS, Servlets, Java Mail, JNDI, JAAS, JAXB), Stripes, Spring Security (Acegi), AJAX, UML, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, SQL, CVS, Subversion, Ant, Testing tools (JUnit, JMock, HTTPUnit), QA Tools(PMD, CheckStyle, EMMA, Find Bugs), XML, XSLT, XPATH
Microsoft C#, VB & ASP .Net, Visual Basic, Obtree, COM, DCOM (ActiveX), Active Server Pages (ASP), Transact SQL, PL/SQL, Access, SQL *plus, Delphi, Cognos, ColdFusion, Source Safe, Testing tools (HP Quality Centre / Mercury Test Director & Quick Test Pro), PHP
Eclipse, WSAD, JBuilder, IntelliJ, Notepad, RAD, Visual Studio
Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Paradox, MySQL, PostgresSQL, MS Access
Numerous J2EE Application servers (including WebLogic, WebSphere, JRun, JBoss & Tomcat), Websphere Portal, Liferay Portal, Magnolia WCMS, Apache, Obtree, IIS, MTS, Exchange Server
Solaris, SCO UNIX, Linux (Redhat, Fedora etc.), MS Windows (3 – 7) & DOS
TCP/IP, LAN, WAN, Cisco Routers & Switches (IOS), various Firewalls
Design Patterns, SOA, AOP, UML, Extreme Programming, RUP, Agile, Prince, various other iterative, test driven and waterfall approaches.
Dave is currently part of a team that has developed a new international online banking application for Barclays Wealth to be used by their private and corporate clients. The system is designed to fully support the needs of customers who hold numerous accounts in a variety of currencies.
Dave is responsible for a large portion of the presentation and integration tiers including all areas of payments (domestic and international, standing orders and one off payments etc.). The presentation tier has been developed using Stripes (a Java web framework similar to JSF) and is heavily dependant on Spring. AOP is used for security, transaction management, auditing etc. and Dave has implemented an annotation driven validation engine capable of handling the complex business rules.
Data is split between an Oracle database and a mainframe requiring the use of Hibernate and JMS respectively.
To fore fill his role affectively Dave has been required to become confident in many banking payment standards including BACS, Swift, SEPA and CHAPS and regularly communicate with business analysts etc.
The application has been release into system test and will be supported by permanent staff going forward.
Java 5, JEE, Stripes, Spring, Hibernate, Oracle, WebSphere 6.1, JMS, JUint, EasMock, CheckStyle, Find Bugs, Eclipse, HTML, JSTL, custom tags, JavaScript
Dave rejoined FDM Group to assist their expansion into the North West. His role was to oversee the role out of their new Manchester office, this involved a range of responsibilities including designing and implementing the infrastructure (LAN/WAN, VPN, comms., etc), coordinating contractors and suppliers, hiring technical and non-technical staff and ensuring adherence to the role out timetable.
Since completing the role out Dave has been training and mentoring junior C# ASP.Net developers.
Dave also provided technical advice and assistance to other areas of FDM Group in areas such as Java (JSF, Spring, Hibernate, etc.), Microsoft Sharepoint, application architecture and design, LMS & CRM selection.
At Fujitsu Dave fore filed the roles of designer and developer. He was responsible producing high and low level design documents and then support a team of developers in the implementation.
The purpose of the project was the replacement of the Post Office point of sale system and provide the ability to react quicker to business process and product line changes. The result was a very complex POS system capable of handling the sale of everything from stamps, postal orders to car tax and processing bill payments and banking transactions. The cornerstone of the application was a bespoke asynchronous scripting engine, Dave was responsible for designing this component and the resulting scripting language was used to define all the Post Office’s products and business processes.
Policy dictated that no open source libraries & frameworks be used as part of the solution consequently a number of the developers were tasked with replicating open source solutions. As a result morale was low amongst the team and Dave elected not to extend beyond his initial contract term.
Java 5, J2EE, PMD, CheckStyle, EMMA, Find Bugs, Fujitsu App. Server (Interstage), Fujitsu IDE (Customised Eclipse), XML, CVS, Luntbuild
UFI is the company behind the Learn Direct brand. Dave is part of the design team on a project to rewrite the entire learning management platform. The current system handles around 10,000 new course enrolments each week and manages over 10 million registered learners. The new J2EE system will replace the existing VB/ASP system.
Dave is responsible for interpreting business use cases, producing UML design documentation and implementing the domain model and service and DAO logic. This requires working closely with the requirements, architecture and development teams as well as business users. Dave was also responsible for other project documentation including web based reports generated from Spring and Hibernate configuration files using XSLT.
The phased release strategy requires compatibility with the existing half terabyte Oracle database; the advanced features of Hibernate are used to achieve this without compromising the domain model. Some data migrations were also required around areas of new & enhanced functionality which had to be highly optimized given the high volumes of data.
Java 5, J2EE, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, AJAX, JUnit, DBUnit, HTTPUnit, JMX, JBoss (clustered in production), Oracle SQL & PL/SQL, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, JSTL, XSLT, XML, Ant, Eclipse, various Eclipse plugins including MyEclipse, Cruise Control, CVS, PMD, CheckStyle, EMMA, Find Bugs, design patterns, RUP, UML, Enterprise Architect, JIRA, Test Director
JJ People is a consultancy, at JJ People Dave was responsible for overseeing projects for clients and internal projects.
The primary internal project involved him leading a team in the re-development and unification of all JJ People’s internal systems using a J2EE portal server and content management system complying with the JSR168 (Portal & Portlet) and 170 (Content Repository) standards.
The project included development of numerous portlets providing collaboration, and CRM functionality and a full learning management system featuring mentorship and support frameworks.
Dave was responsible for architecting the entire system, producing use cases and designs using UML and allocating work packages to team members using developers in the UK and Canada. An iterative / agile approach was used.
The system used Struts, Spring and Hibernate and is application server and database agnostic. The system was designed using various standard design patterns and a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA).
Dave also developed a Windows CE client that allowed sales staff to use the CRM functionality whilst on the road. This was developed using C# & ASP .Net and SOAP to communicate with the web services exposed by the J2EE application.
Java 5, J2EE, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, EJB, JMS, Liferay Portal Server, Portlets, JSR-168, JSR-170, JSP, AJAX, Servlets, JavaMail, JUnit, JMX, Tiles, JSF, Apache, JBoss (development), WebShere (production), MySQL, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, JSTL, XSLT, XML, Ant, PMD, CheckStyle, EMMA, Eclispe, Luntbuild, Subversion (SVN), WSAD, design patterns, UML
Dave produced the design specification from existing requirements documents then architected and developed a Test Management application that simplifies the testing of the Thales’s authentication server and its API.
Development was completed remotely using an iterative approach with regular onsite visits.
The tool provides a framework for the easy development of test cases that exercise the numerous EJB, SOAP and RMI interfaces of the authentication server. The application builds on the functionality offered by JUnit with a rich Java Swing GUI and allows test cases to be run multiple times using data from CSV files.
UML, Java 5, Swing, JUnit, J2EE, EJB, SOAP, Axis, RMI, XML, JBoss, Ant, JBuilder
Worked as part of a team developing an online booking and scheduling system for football pitches, gyms etc.
Dave joined the team as a Liferay Portal specialist and his role included mentoring and training other team members in the use of the Liferay framework and portal / portlet development in general.
The system managed the entire process including FA registration of teams and players, league and fixture generation and staff, referee and resource scheduling.
The system used Liferay (an open source J2EE portal server complying with the JSR168 standards) and Struts, Spring and Hibernate with an Oracle database. Additionally JMS was used to queue longer running tasks like league and fixture generation.
Dave was also responsible for designing and implementing a deployment strategy. This was done using Luntbuild (an ant based continuous integration tool).
Java 5, J2EE, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, JMS, Portal Server, Portlets, JSR-168, JSP, JUnit, JMX, Tiles, JSF, AJAX, Apache, JBoss, Oracle PL/SQL, HTML, JavaScript, JSTL, Ant, Eclispe, Luntbuild, Subversion (SVN), Eclipse, design patterns, UML
FDM Group is an IT solutions company. Whilst working at FDM Group Dave has worked on a number of projects for clients in various sectors primarily using J2EE and web based technologies and was also responsible ensuring maximum availability for FDM’s production systems.
Royal Bank of Scotland Insurance Services (RBSIS) sells ten different insurance products (car, home, life etc.) under twenty five different brands (Direct Line, Churchill, Tesco, Privilege etc.) to the public via their web sites.
Dave assisted RBSIS in delivering a major project which involved the complete re-write of these sites in order to comply with accessibility guidelines and provide an architecture that made future re-branding straight forward and also simplified the process of adding new brands and products.
The wizard style application, developed using J2EE technologies, used Struts and JAXB to communicate with an underwriting engine one a mainframe via a middle tier server using a service orientated architecture (SOA).
Dave was responsible for leading a team of over twenty people in the development of the presentation which made extensive use of JSP fragments, JSTL, highly configurable resource bundles and CSS and was responsible for communicating with RBSIS Business managers as well as external compliance agencies and RBSIS partners such as Tesco and Virgin.
With the project’s focus on accessibility, Dave was responsible for training all new members of the team in how to meet accessibility guidelines using the CSS and provide ongoing mentorship and support throughout the project.
Java, J2EE, Struts, JSP, JSTL, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML, JAXB, JUnit, Ant, CVS, WebSphere, Mercury Test Director & Quick Test Pro, Eclipse, UML
Dave was involved in the full lifecycle of this project from requirements gathering to delivery and UAT. The aim of the project was to move a public facing website operated by the Department of Trade and Industry from legacy technologies to ASP .Net and meet accessibility guidelines.
ASP .Net, SQL Server, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, perl, CVS
Dave carried out analysis of FDM’s worldwide IT infrastructure and then let a team to upgrade and centralise all systems using Windows 2003 Terminal Server and upgrading the VPN. The objective of this project was to improve performance and availability of FDM’s internal systems.
Windows 2003, SQL Sever 2003, Exchange 2003, Cisco IOS, TCP/IP, Firewall & Router configuration
Dave carried out analysis of various CMS tools including Zope and Obtree and subsequently developed a proof of concept using Obtree.
This exercise required Dave to quickly gain an in depth understanding or the features and functionality offered by Obtree and build a site that replicated FDM’s current web site in terms of content but was easy to manage but designers without in depth technical knowledge. The POC also had to demonstrate the integration capabilities of Obtree by integrating with a number of Java and ASP based sites.
Windows 2003, SQL Sever 2003, Obtree, Zope, Java, VB, ASP, JSP, J2EE, servlets, JavaScript, XML, HTML, CSS, IIS, ISAPI
Dave managed a team of three people in the design and delivery of a J2EE application to track the progress of mortgage application and in particular record the correspondence sent to customers. The purpose of the project was to prove compliance with FSA regulations. Fast and efficient delivery was essential to meet regulation changes.
Responsible for liaising with project sponsors and producing high level designs and then allocation of work packages to developers.
Design patterns, UML, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, JSP, Java, J2EE, Struts, Oracle 10g, SQL, PL/SQL, CVS, WSAD
Having recently acquired three low margin – high turnover loans brokerage companies LSB needed to review their individual business processes and design a system that catered for all there needs and provided centralized control and reporting.
Dave performed all the analysis and let a team of four that developed a functioning prototype using HTML, JavaScript and XML. The prototyping used an iterative approach to ensure the requirements of all parties were met.
HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML, XSL, Java, CVS, WSAD
Dave worked as part of a team that produced XSL transformations to generate HTML from XML generated from an electronic book. The data was the entire medical condition, symptom and treatment encyclopaedia and consisted of thousands of pages including complex characters and hieroglyphics.
XML, XSLT, Java, CVS, Ant
Dave designed the architecture and led a team in the development of a web based application developed using J2EE technologies that allowed users to link television programs to the applications launched using ‘the red button’ and configure the times during the program that the application should be available.
HTML, JavaScript, CSS, JUnit, Java, J2EE, Struts, XML, Oracle, SQL, CVS, Weblogic, RAD, UML
Flextech are part of Telewest and own a number of television channels including Living TV, Bravo, UK Gold and all the other UKTV channels.
Dave worked as part of team extending and optimising a highly complex J2EE application with a thick (Swing) client. The application runs on WebLogic and uses an Objectstore database.
The application is used to schedule all the adverts in commercial breaks across all of Flextech’s channels. It includes a very complicated rules engine and handles all aspect of the process of running an advert including handling late changes, billing and preventing adverts from being shown within programs that have the same actors.
Java, J2EE, Swing, Object Store Weblogic, CVS, Solaris, JUnit, IntelliJ
Virgin Atlantic’s approach to their ever increasing development pressures was to design their systems internally, break them into discrete components and have those components developed simultaneously by various teams
Dave ran a small team in the development of several of these components including:
Flight Status EJBs, this suite of EJBs is used by various applications including Virgin Atlantic’s public web site to interrogate back end data-stores and return the status of any of their flights based on either departure or arrival information or the flight number.
Terminal Information EJB, this EJB returned departure and arrival terminal and airport details based on the flight number supplied.
Dave also developed a web based component management system to track the usage of all components and the dependency model of each one.
Java, J2EE, EJB, XML, XSD, CVS, RAD, design patterns
Dave was part of the team that let FDM’s expansion into America, establishing their offices in North Carolina and later in Washington, DC. Dave was responsible for the operational aspects of the US division including building the communication infrastructure.
Dave held the position of Technical Manager and was responsible for:
Supporting the IT systems to ensure maximum performance and availability.
Leading outsource and development efforts for clients (government including the IRS and private including EDS) as required
Managing internal training and selection for FDM Group Campus training program.
Manage up to 100 consultants and ensure their skills are kept current.
Liaise with FDM Group sales staff on availability of consultants from the training program and finishing existing assignments.
Maintain contact with FDM Group Clients to ensure consultants are trained in marketable skills.
Whilst in America Dave also worked on the following projects.
FDM Group Campus is a complete eLearning environment that goes beyond web enabled training course to provide, student support, mentorship. The system makes extensive use of most of the J2EE APIs particularly EJB, JMS, Java Mail, JSP and Servlets. The system is deployed using WebLogic and SQL Server on NT but was built to be cross application server, database and operating systems.
Responsible for the entire project including:
· System, architecture and infrastructure analysis and design
· Team compilation
· Project management
· Implementation and delivery
HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML, XSL, Java, Struts, JSP, Ant, J2EE, Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, MS SQL Server, JUnit, CVS, JMS, JavaMail, EJB, Servlets, Weblogic, design patterns, UML
CT is a web based Client Relationship and Sales Force Automation system. The system provides extensive workflow and tracking capabilities as well as reporting and integration to a back office billing system and legacy CRM solutions still use in Europe.
This product was developed using ASP, COM, DCOM and SQL Server. In order to effectively integrate with legacy systems the application also used a Java to COM bridge. Ant scripts where used to manage the complex deployment scenario which involved IIS and mod_jk to hand requests for the Java web components off to JBoss
In addition to performing much of the development, responsible for:
· System, architecture and infrastructure analysis and design
· Database design
· Project management
· Testing and Implementation
HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML, XSL, Java, Struts, JSP, Ant, J2EE, IIS, JBoss, Tomcat, MS SQL Server, JUnit, Visual Basic, COM, ASP, Source Safe, JMS, JavaMail, EJB, JSP, Servlets
This system facilitates 'Straight Through Processing' of trades. Although this is a very large and complicated system, in general terms it can be described as, is a workflow system that automate certain tasks, including communicating with legacy systems, information feeds and other organizations, to facilitate the expeditious processing of trades.
The system was developed using J2EE technologies and was particularly dependant on JMS, the application was deployed on WebLogic and used ETX as the messaging backbone to communicate with numerous data stores.
Java, J2EE, EJB, Weblogic, JMS, Oracle, SQL, PL/SQL
As well as working as a developer on several projects primarily using ASP, COM and SQL Server, Dave was responsible for developing and delivering training courses in Microsoft technologies including Visual Basic 6 including COM, ASP and SQL Server.
Supervise a watch of about fifteen air traffic controllers and carry out routine air traffic tasks.
Various Royal Air Force Bases in England, Germany, Gibraltar and the Gulf.
Wide range of roles from including Air Traffic Controller, Operations Officer and IT Manager.
Manage small network of eight PCs running DOS, Windows 3.11 and 95.
Support users of Microsoft Office 4.2 and Word Perfect 5.1
Develop bespoke applications using Visual Basic for Applications under Microsoft Office to automate routine tasks.
Numerous supervisory roles.