Leo Allen
Technical Consultant/Software Engineer
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leo.f.allen@gmail.com
+44 (0)7841 528 905
Profile
From helping start-ups get off the ground to working in large teams for established websites with millions of users, I have over 10 years experience creating, developing, designing and advising for companies in four continents in all aspects required to make a successful online business.
Skills
- Software Engineering
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I’m passionate about writing well-written, clean code that can be easily
understood and built on in the future. My expertise lies mainly in
object-oriented programming (although Ruby is my favourite language I’ll happily
code in whatever language is required for the job), and wherever possible I like
to test-drive the process of writing that code.
- Project Direction
- Experience in managing, directing and training teams, ensuring that team members are happy, engaged and productive, and implementing best practices as advised by the agile manifesto - Extreme Programming (XP) being my preferred flavour of agile - to get the job done effectively with as little time wasted on pointless managerial procedures.
- Product Development
- I believe the key to web development is communication, and most importantly this is ensuring that the business goals and the technical needs are working together nicely. That’s why I’ve found my most successful projects have been those in which I’ve been allowed to give technical insights into the direction of the business/product.
Selected Experience
- Makers Academy
- Senior Engineer/Coach
2014-2016
Returned to Makers Academy (Europe’s largest coding bootcamp) to lead up the
Engineering team, introducing best practices such as Continuous
Integration/Deployment, XP-themed Agile, TDD, pair programming, etc. Helped
update the curriculum with Node.js and Angular.js, and coached hundreds of students
into their first job. Worked on product design, introducing
Design Sprints and doing proper UX with user interviews and metrics. Helped the
team experiment with self-management, and introduced ideas of self-management
into the engineering team.
- Enternships
- Lead Developer
2013-2014
Acted as interim Lead Developer for a socially-minded jobs board for young people. Assisted in the rebuilding from scratch of the website in Rails, introducing a strict BDD-based approach to code development, whilst overseeing a more agile system of team management.
- ECPAT International
- Web Designer/Technical Consultant
2013
Advised Bangkok-based international charity with subsidiaries in over 70 countries on the direction they should take technically. Following this consultancy volunteered to rebuild and redesign their current site, and based on a thorough research of their user’s and the charities needs built a Drupal site with a cleaned-up, stripped-down design.
- CouchSurfing.org
- Software Engineer
2011-2012
Worked on one of the largest and well-established travel websites (with over 6 million registered users), both on over-hauling the current site, creating a new events system, as well as being entrusted with architecting and building the API for their mobile apps.
- Mukuru.com
- Lead Developer
2008-2010
Architected and built an entire mobile money-transfer system - the same system is still being used four years on and and has transferred over $1 billion using an innovative SMS-based approach. Included in the system was a custom-built accounting application, anti-fraud protection, CRM and more.
- Freelance Developer
- Lead Developer
2004-2008
Built websites for various clients on a freelance basis using HTML, CSS,
JavaScript and PHP.
Education
First Class Honours in Intellectual and Cultural History, University of Sussex
leo.f.allen@gmail.com — +44 (0) 7841 528 905 — http://github.com/pitchinvasion