tom robinson

In my role as lead of the tooling team at OpenGamma I am primarily concerned with the operational efficiency and scalability of the company. We're a growing, successful FinTech start-up and that comes with a variety of growing pains. Everything we do is hosted in AWS (primarily with a microservice architecture deployed via AWS Lambda), which helps while presenting its own set of problems. My team is primarily concerned with tackling these growing pains; making life easier for both the tech and business sides of the company. I personally work on many of the solutions to these problems - especially where a terraform (infrastructure as code) or Kotlin/Java solution is possible - but I also empower my team to deliver a variety of solutions across CLIs, web tools, CI/CD, monitoring, etc. In addition to this I am always looking for ways to improve our organisation's ability to communicate and collaborate effectively; I have spearheaded efforts to adopt alerting and project management solutions and agile methodologies to help facilitate this.

I was lead developer in a small team working on one of the company's major products (staff rostering software). In addition to designing and implementing several business-critical projects I also had an active role in project management of my team as well as in training junior developers.

TransHuman design is an independent game development group headed up by Michal Marcinkowski, the Polish game developer of Soldat. In the time I was with THD the focus was on one game in particular - King Arthur's Gold. I worked part-time around my studies, with my main focus being on developing systems that were not directly related to gameplay. My primary focus was the design and development of a RESTful Web API - which provided several important roles in facilitating the online aspect of the game. There was also a community management aspect to my role - I managed the forums, dealt with support issues and generally kept up a dialogue with the people that played our game.

I am currently development lead on a web application project within regulatory reporting at Credit Suisse. The application existed before I joined, but I completely redesigned it to better support rapid development and modern web technologies, using a C# Web API backend and AngularJS frontend. Initially the bulk of my time was spent on developing this application, but now a significant portion of my time is also spent on training the developers in my team, as well as coordinating team efforts, performing code reviews, interviewing potential new hires, liaising with our clients, and other activities in my capacity as development lead. As part of this project I abstracted out much of what I had built into a framework intended to meet the needs of several web applications within other regulatory reporting teams (all sharing very similar requirements and UI designs). This has now been rolled out to the other RR teams and I continue to drive the development of both the framework (which all RR teams now contribute to) and my own team's web applications.