Andy White
Developer // Digital Agency Founder // CTO
Over 15 years experience in planning, scoping and designing the architecture of digital business solutions. Projects range from data and systems to websites, web apps and the numerous interconnecting services behind the scenes.
I've worked as a full stack developer, technical director, CTO and most recently consultant. Over the years I have developed a wide range of operational, financial and human resource skills. In contrast to some of my solely technical counterparts, this gives me a more holistic view - I see decisions in context of the complex interchange between business needs, human factors and available technology.
My ability to quickly understand abstract concepts, think laterally and problem solve at speed has has earned me a reputation as a trusted advisor and thought leader with those I work with.
I have been lucky enough to enjoyed many years of ideas generation and researching solutions for a vast range of organisations. I bolster this with an experienced professional network who act as a highly valuable sounding board on ideas and thinking.
Skills & Experience
The following is not an exhaustive list, it aims to offer an overview of the digital industry experience I bring to the table.
Industries
My career has afforded me experince working with an exclectic range of organizations across various industries;
Technology
Higher Education
Investment
Retail
Charity
Healthcare
Real Estate & Construction
Telecoms
Technologies
Infrastructure & Code
This is a non-exhaustive list of technologies I have personally reviewed, tested, proposed or implemented in the past.
Databases/Storage Engines:
- Big Query The majority of stateful data storage needs across
- Postgres The majority of stateful data storage needs across
- MySQL The majority of stateful data storage needs across
- Firebase The majority of stateful data storage needs across
- MongoDB We used filtering and aggregation to handle a requirment to compare/caulate against hundreds of thousands of real estate record comparisons in real time. The technology excelled at the task. Robo 3T was used to develop the original quries, then the service was depoyed ot a stand alone srver and wrapped with a REST API to handle requests from the web app.
- Neo4j Currently a front runner in our technology selection for a computer part compatability web service project
- SQLite For small simple apaps that require data storage, SQLite has prived many times it offers a pleasnely quick, easy solution.
- MS SQL Worling with varoius corporate scale clients ultiamtly exposes you to MS SQL from time to time. I have previously complted a migration from an Azure MS SQL server to MySQL as part of a webapp build.
- Redis When Redis was relativly new and I was a freelance contracot, I wrote an Expression Engine plugun to index all the meta data from a stock image library website contining circa 500k images. The plugin eleviated the MySQL bottleneck.
- Memcached We have used Memcached as part of Magento setups in the past.
- ElasticSearch We ran a discovery project on a woocmoomcer build utilins a range of extensions to see if it could stand up to large enterpirste product catalogues. Elastic search allowed us to create an instantly responsive real-time search with ease. The test were relativly successful, but ultimatly the clinet decided to adopt Shopify.
Environments:
- Linux
- Node
- Docker
- Apache
- Nginx
- VMware
- Mac OS
- MS Windows
Foundations:
- DNS working with domain names has been relevnt to nearly ebry project
- SSL/HSTS
- SSH The standard for access and manipulating web servers on nearly every project.
- REST/SOAP Dealing with 100s of APIs int he pst and speccing and writing a couple, these protocols are ubqiutious to modern web development.
- Email: POP, SMTP, IMAP, SPF, DKIM As such a ubiquitous aspect of the web, understanding of email protocols and routing has been relevant hrought mu career.
- Proxies We have used proxies in the past to seamlessly switch user traffic to new ssites without wiaint for DNS propogation)
- VPNs VPNs have been used for secure access via whitelisted IPs to secure servers.
- Firewalls Various firewall configuration over the years. Typically created IP level ruels.
- TCP/IP etc. Having studied netowrks at univesity a protocol level of understading of data interchange on the web has often offered me greater insight into the.
Optimisation/Architectures:
- Serverless
- SOA
- MVC
- CI/CD
- Jamstack
- Pipelines
- Caches
- Sharding
- Bottlenecks
- CDNs
- Minification
- Compression
- SEO
- CRO
IaaS/PaaS/SaaS/IaC:
- Google Cloud Platform
- AWS Use of various web services, understanding of IAMand billing. Most comonly S3 and EC2.
- Terraform
- MS Azure Experince with Azure was consuming clinet data and moved away from the platform.
- Cloudways I instigated out miraitkn to Cloudways in X, the comodotisation of webservers and assocated services was inveitable and this allowed us to redue/remove outr reliance on dev ops staffing with little to no negative impact to our offering.
- Netlify experimenting with continuoue delivery
- Digital Ocean
- Cloudflare
- Twillio
- Apache Kafka When reviewing potential microservice solutions, Kafka stood out a desirable messaging service, wiaint gof rth erigt project to propose it's impletnaton.
Languages
- PHP
- Python
- Javascript
- SQL
- HTML
- CSS/SASS
- Twig/Handlebars/Liquid/Blade
Frameworks:
- Laravel/Lumen
- FastAPI
- Express.js
- Flask
- Synphony
- Silex
Source control, build tools, package management, testing, etc.:
- Git (Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab)
- NPM
- Composer
- Parcel.js
- Gulp
- Postman
Payment Services:
- Stripe
- PayPal/Braintree
- Sagepay
- Go Cardless
Software & Efficiency
Tools of the trade
Project Management:
- Asana
- ClickUp
- Jira
- Harvest
- BaseCamp
- TeamWeek
- Trello
Methodologies:
- Kanban
- Lean
- MVP
- Agile
Business & Collaboration:
- Google Apps
- MS 365
- AirTable
- Miro
- Notion
- Xero
- Quickbooks
- Figma
- InVision
Concepts & Paradigms:
- Principal of Least Astonishment
- Grand Unified Theory of Software Development
- Functional Programming
- Test Driven Development
- No Free Lunch Theorem
Content Management:
- Wordpress
- Joomla
- Drupal
- Expression Engine
- Craft
- Perch
BI/Analytics/CRO:
- Google Analytics
- Google Data Studio
- Tableau
- HotJar
- Google Optimize
E-commerce:
- Shopify
- Stripe Checkout
- Woocommerce
- Magento
IDEs:
- VS Code
- Sublime
- Jupyter
- Spyder
- Google Colab
CRMs:
- Hubspot
- Salesforce
- Insightly
Education
Master of Research
Bournemouth University 2018 - 2020
Interactive Data Forecasting for NHS England's 'prevention at scale' initiative
Research Project:
- Statistics/ML (Univariate & Causal Inference)
- Action Research
- Public Health
- Inter-professional Behavioural Change
- Epidemiology
- Python
Thesis:
An opportunity arose to use my novel thinking style and technical known-how to complete a funded masters for the public good.
Completing this alongside running a growing company was particularly challenging.
Title: "An exploratory case study analysis of the role evidence based communication plays in GP referral rates"
Bachelor of Science (Hons)
Bournemouth University 2001 - 2005
Multimedia Communication Systems
Year 1:
- Software Development
- Database Systems
- Multimedia Development
- Communication Systems
- Multimedia Computer Architecture
- Business Enterprise & Development
Year 2:
- Client-Server System Development
- Computer Networks
- Distributed Multimedia Systems
- Management of Multimedia Projects
- Human Computer Interfaces
- Creative Multimedia Design
Year 3:
One year industrial placement. I worked for Bournemouth & Poole College within their Information Learning Technology department.
The role used various technologies to build online learning materials for student use.
During this year the college was looking to rebuild their website, as a counter option to finding an agency I produced a website prototype that brought the project in-house. I was asked to defer a year, which I declined, and they went on to hire two permanent staff to continue the project.
Year 4:
- Advanced Networks
- Digital Communication Systems
- E-Business
- Individual Project
- Advanced Multimedia Design
A-level
Exmouth Community College 1999 - 2001
- Computer Science
- Physics
- Media Studies