Chris Tomlinson Resume

Contact Information

Name: Chris Tomlinson
Address: Basement Flat
370 Goldhawk Road
Stamford Brook, London
W6 0XF
Country: United Kingdom
Phone: +447952841265 (mobile) +44208 8675 2482 (home)
Email: Please contact via website
Website: www.mightystuff.net

Personal Information

Date of Birth: 21st July 1975 (31 years)
Place of Birth: Kalamunda, Western Australia
Citizenship: Australian
Visa Status: Current UK Work Permit
Gender: Male

Personal Statement

I am a tenacious and dedicated technical lead with over 6 years experience in the IT industry focusing on the complete project life cycle from design, analysis, testing, performance, documentation and end user training. With an educational background in architecture I strive to ensure technology is useable and even taken for granted by people.
My main interests lie in cutting edge digital communications technology and enjoy the never ending learning curve of keeping up to date with the new frontiers in digital communication. I advocate a hands on approach and enjoy working with talented people on common-sense, creative solutions to new problems. I have a broad skill set which has evolved from using the correct tools for the job at hand.
My current ambition is to stay ahead of emerging Web 2.0 methodologies and branch into the different contexts that the new digital age implies such as mobile and portable. Currently in a management position, I would like to take responsibility for even larger and more diversified projects, particularly where the opportunity to do something new or previously un-tried exists.

An up to date version of this cv and links to references can be found at http://www.mightystuff.net/resume

Project Case Studies

Liquorice CMS

Developed over 4 years initially as a tool to enable me to provide web based projects quickly to clients in Australia. I brought the system to Liquorice with the intention of replacing the individual and disparate web applications that the company used with the benefits of one centralised system making workflow more efficient, application development a familiarised process and creating a unique product in its own right.

The Liquorice CMS has transformed the company into being able to focus more on content delivery, design and marketing acumen and at the same time freeing up internal resources and infrastructure and being able to offer clients a robust and reliable content/asset and resource management system.

Key Features:

The following key features were important and needed to be addressed from an architectural point of view:
  • Database abstraction - the ability to be portable across multiple data environments including MySQL, Access, SQLServer etc.To facilitate this ADODB was used as the abstraction layer.
  • Scaleability - the scale of applications of the cms was an unknown quantity so it needed to be able to work for micro sites as well as enterprise level sites. Examples of large scale use include http://uwc.org with approximately 30,000 student, graduate and staff users and http://www.sunsail.co.uk with approximately 2500 pages or items of text content across four different languages and over 3000 digital media assets. As well as a robust abstraction layer, the GACL access control system was integrated to enable configuration of permissions and privileges across groups of users, websites and practically every object available to the cms. Other methods such as non-sticky sessions allowing for load balanced server configurations and careful database indexing help to allow the application to scale. http://davidlloydleisure.co.uk is an example of one site which began as a micro-site and with un-anticipated growth now contains over 20 different data collection points and each fitness club in the group is managed by individual club staff.
  • Variability - the breadth of difference between each instance of the cms was also an unknown quantity so the system needed to be able to deal with a wide variety of business problems. The target audiences of each instance were also quite varied. Applications included educational, property, investment, sport and leisure, holidays, fmcg, brochureware, shopping etc. A sturdy templating engine was employed that emulates Smarty tags to separate the presentation layer from the business logic layer. Complete separation of the websites content, presentation and functionality from the cms itself was also required to enable the system to be used for many different clients with many different requirements. The ability to separate the stylesheets and templates from page content, and restricting the use of design elements when editing page content for example allows for non technical people to update content without affecting the websites design.
  • Useability - An intuitive UI was required that allowed for a broad range of usage scenarios. Graphic designers, web developers, programmers, content editors and even CEO's needed to be able to use the system in a common way. As well as restricting access to different user groups, or roles, a recogniseable browse/edit/publish method was designed for the adminstration areas of the CMS. Items such as products, FAQ entries, blog entries, news items, events are editable in a consistently familiar way, requiring a limited set of documentation that can be used across all clients.

Implementation:

The CMS was designed initially with a fusebox framework and written in PHP 5 with backwards compatibility with PHP 4. A three tier architecture and service oriented architectures such as web services were employed to enable future growth. Many other leading open source modules and methods have been used such as FCK Editor for rich text editing, Anti-Word and PDFtoHTML for indexing and converting Microsoft Word documents and Adobe PDF files, Celko nested sets for large tree traversal as well as 2 useful image manipulation tools of my own creation:
Thumbnail script - used to automatically resize, crop and resample images meaning the interim step of preparation of artwork to be web ready is removed (http://www.mightystuff.net/php_thumbnail_script )
Font writer - creates a block of text as a PNG/JPG image (http://mightystuff.net/code/php_font_writer)
A recursive interpreter was created (parseSnippet) that allows for nesting and iterating of parseSnippet commands which serves the purpose of, like Smarty tags, being able to mark up content with dynamic elements without endangering the application from a security and portability point of view.
Recent development has been into shopping modules with a complete rewrite of OSCommerce but with backwards compatibility with many of its existing modules such as payment and shipping. Examples of shop deployments are http://godfreys.com and http://canterburynz.com . Additional modules such as a warehouse for stock control and a terminal for call center sales have also been included, along with forums, events, sms contact, email campaign management, the ability to create additional database objects with an integrated data dictionary and an inline editing system to ease finding and updating content. AJAX implementations such as the ability to edit table cells have also been introduced bringing the benefits of a more intuitive and quicker to use interface.

Trinity Mirror BEAMER 

This was a marketing tool that allows the user to browse a UK map and find over 260 newspaper titles that may be suitable for advertising campaigns. It was designed for 7 different releases: one for media planners/buyers (http://beamer-research.co.uk) and six for consumers (http://www.ncjmedia.co.uk , http://www.mediainwales.co.uk , http://www.coventrynewspapers.co.uk etc.). It was completed in April 2006 and took approximately 4 months to develop with the assistance of another Actionscript developer and a Qanvert expert.


Since launch both consumers and media planners have been able to make at-a-glance informed marketing decisions on both national and regional campaign scales.

Key features:

  • Ability to scale and zoom a complete UK map between regions, areas, districts and sectors, with location labelling relevant to the particular zoom level and title overlays.
  • Accordion interface to retrieve a library of newspaper titles with click throughs to the data relevant to each title: demographics, readership, research, advertising rates.
  • Upweighting of regional titles against the most popular national titles.
  • Scheduling of multiple titles to measure the impact of an advertising campaign on readership figures.
  • Integrated graphs with printing and exporting ability.

Implementation:

The application, written in Flash in Actionscript 2 with a C# ASP.NET server for data, utilises a strict model-view-controller architecture to allow the different 'views' of consumer and media planner to use the same engine. Several components were used and handlers re-written to allow for some specific UI features.

The mapping software used ArcGIS postcode sector data that was converted to SVG, then converted to SWF via Ming . Given that there are approximately 8000 postcode sectors in the UK, the mapping needed to be asynchronous and uses a similar method to google maps to load data on demand. Individual title overlays were also created with Ming.

The data comes from 2 sources: a MySQL database and a Qanvert data source that required writing extensive XSLT to interpret the XML output from the SPSS com object that communicated with Qanvert. The C# ASP.NET service provides all data as XML to the client application, being interpreted at this level with XPATH. The graphing software used the Zedgraph project.

Employment History

May 2004 – Present Day (2 years 8 months)

Liquorice (Now Smarteez)

Marketing, communication and digital solutions provider

Position:

Chief Technical Officer


Reference:
Drew Burdon (drew_burdon@hotmail.com) (Head of Digital)
Phone +447968490276


Tasks and Responsibilities:

Initially was brought on board as a developer following my contract position previously and subsequently introduced a CMS solution developed by myself via MightyStuff. The solution became the core internal product at the company and is now deployed on over 40 websites including:

www.davidlloydleisure.co.uk, www.sunsail.co.uk,, www.canterburynz.com, www.godfreys.com , www.bachremedies.co.uk , www.shooba.co.uk , www.historicroyalpalaces.com , www.ascotuw.com , www.beerfromthecoast.co.uk, www.uwc.org , www.smarteezpleez.com (a full list is available on request).
I was promoted in 2006 as Chief Technical Officer and the role entailed communication with clients on a technical level to provide integrated digital solutions, as well as overseeing all aspects of development work.

I managed a team of 4-8, including contractors based in-house and external development resources based in South Africa, Australia, Czech Republic and Tunisia.

Centralised workflow across contractors, employees and clients with Subversion version management clients and servers.

Extended the product line to include a warehouse application, SMS gateways, data reporting and analysis tools and an e-commerce call center terminal application.

Responsible for designing and deploying solutions with budgets exceeding £200,000.


Skills acquired in Subversion, Load balancing, Actionscript 2, Flash 7-8, Design Patterns, UML, AJAX, PHP 5, MySQL 5, SEO, JSP, Java.

April 2004 – May 2004 – 2 months

CMR International

Pharmaceutical Services Company

Position:

Database Administrator


Tasks and Responsibilities:

Created queries and stored procedures along with miscellaneous programming tasks. The specific role was to create competitive statistical reports for consumption by 200 of the worlds leading pharmaceutical companies, pulling information from customer supplied access databases and pushing it to SQL Server. I designed a web based approach to supersede the current client communication infrastructure and was approached to become lead technical architect of the team but turned down the position in favour of a full time position at Liquorice.


Skills acquired in C#, SQL Server 2000, Access, ASP.NET.

December 2003 – February 2004 – 3 months

Libermens Consulting

IT Solutions Provider

Position:

UI Designer/.NET Developer


Tasks and Responsibilities:

Provided consultation for mobile phone corporation O2. Designed the user interface for a call centre system that allowed call centre operators to retrieve legacy billing information for approximately 12 million united kingdom accounts. Was retained to design, code and implement the web application developed with the .NET framework in C#. Was also tasked to implement the network required to deal with the load.


Skills acquired in C#, SQL Server 2000, ASP.NET.

June 2003 –Consultation

Webprojects (Now The Escape Committee)

Digital Content and Media Company

Position:

Consultant


Reference:
Ben Sauer (ben@escapecommittee.com) (Director)
Phone 01737 768127


Tasks and Responsibilities:

Provided problem solving for webprojects including resolving compatiblity issues with rich text editors working across different platforms and browsers including IE 5, Mac IE, Mozilla.

Also streamlined digital asset management with on the fly optimisation of jpeg images using PHP and GD. Provided assistance in designing and optimising their fusebox cms framework.


Skills acquired in Cross browser compatibilites, Javascript DOM, PHP, ImageMagick and GD Libraries.

December 2000 – September 2006 – 6 years (ongoing)

Mighty Stuff

Internet and Multimedia Services Company

Position:

Managing Director


Tasks and Responsibilities:

Mighty Stuff is a freelance consulting venture providing new media, network and print design solutions for any sized application. In this venture I have deployed many CMS and CRM solutions, built open source server and client applications, created and administered artroom mac/pc networks, co developed a national SQL server solution for a point of sale database application, designed and programmed websites utilising both Microsoft and open source technologies, designed tourism maps, magazines, posters and websites. I have also established a Linux/Apache/ MySQL/PHP website hosting service and administer three Linux servers hosting twelve websites.


Skills acquired in MySQL, PHP, MSSQL, DNS, Flash, Actionscripting, nameservers, statistics and firewall configurations. Web server creation and administration with Linux and Apache.

November 2003 – December 2003 – 3 weeks (contract)

Liquorice

Marketing, communication and e-solutions provider

Position:

Developer


Reference:
Murray Becket (murray.beckett@liquorice.net) (Project Manager)
Phone 020 7471 7200


Tasks and Responsibilities:

In a three week fill-in position at Liquorice I was responsible for creating and implementing the Madame Tussauds Online Shop (using eCommerce, PHP and Mysql), Building an ASP/MySQL CMS and website front end for a B2B technology company and designing and programming a bulk christmas mailer for subscribers and supporters of Kettle Chips.


Skills acquired in OSCommerce, XML payment gateways, ASP, MySQL, PHP, sendmail

August 2003 – September 2003 – 2 months (contract)

360 Inovision

Multimedia Services Company

Position:

Software Developer


Reference:
Ian Craigmile (ianc@360inovision.com) (Developer)
Phone 0208 878 6398


Tasks and Responsibilities:

I was contracted by 360 Inovision to create a Flash based tool for creating multimedia resources for non technical users. The brief asked for a intuitive interface that would allow users to add and modify 360 degree virtual tour images, photographs, videos and audio to a microsite available from the users website. The tool was built in Flash MX, and utilised an XML abstraction layer and PHP scripts with a MySQL database.


Skills acquired in Flash MX, XML, MySQL, PHP

October 2001 – March 2002 – 6 months

E-Comm Marketing

Marketing and e-commerce solution provider

Position:
Production Manager – Web Development


Reference:
Sam Ritchie (sam@samritchie.net) (Database Developer)
Phone 0417 921 861


Tasks and Responsibilities:

Develop and deploy a national rewards program website (www.bananaz.com.au). Develop intranet and customer resource management solutions. Liaise with database administrator, sales, network staff. I was employed initially as a Graphic Designer but was promoted to manager of the web development team. I was responsible for designing and developing the Bananaz website, coordinating the IT staff and reporting to senior management and clients.


Skills acquired in Microsoft SQL Server 2000, ASP, VB.

December 1999 – December 2000 – 1 year

Documenta

Internet and Multimedia Services Company

Position:
State Manager


Reference:
Andrew Baird (andrewb@spectrumitconsulting.com.au) (General Manager)
Phone +61 2 9281 2844, fax +61 2 9281 2386


Tasks and Responsibilities:

Manage state office. Handle accounts and customer relations. Oversee production work. Program and design multimedia and web site content. Created Flash presentations and games, Director CD-ROM’s, HTML/PHP websites as well as print publications (books, catalogues and company literature). Handled clients technical queries relating to websites, bulk cd-creation, hard drive recoveries/ virus problems and hardware/software installation and upgrading.


Skills acquired in Director Shockwave Studio (including Lingo), HTML, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Flash 4 and 5, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Adobe Acrobat. Web server creation and administration with IIS.

1995 – 2003 – 7 years

Access Press

West Australian Book Publishers

Position:
Production Manager


Reference:
Helen Weller (Managing Director)
Phone +61 8 9379 3188, fax +61 8 9479 3199


Tasks and Responsibilities:

Create and design layouts for books including childrens story books, shire and family histories, biographies and scientific journals. Prepare film negatives for offset printing. Oversee printing process and quality control. In my time at Access Press I have designed and typeset over 50 books.


Skills acquired in QuarkXpress, Adobe Pagemaker, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Coreldraw, Macromedia Freehand and relevant printing procedures including binding, embossing, die-cutting, web and offset presses.

September 1999 – December 1999 – 4 months

Doctor Disk

Data Recovery and Conversion Services

Position:
State Production Manager/Technical Services 


Reference:
Guy Weller (mrpickwick@hermes.com.au) (Managing Director)
Phone +61 2 4787 1899, fax +61 2 4787 1999


Tasks and Responsibilities:

Oversee all production work. Program and design data conversion solutions. Burn CD’s in small to large quantities. State liason for disaster recoveries, including hard drive and virus recoveries. Optical character recognition preparation and scanning. Hardware technician – diagnose and replace faulty hardware and software components. Responsible for support of Sophos anti-virus deployments and sales.


Skills acquired in NT, Netware, Linux, hardware and software diagnosis, virus disaster recovery and hard drive recovery.

Educational Background

1993 – 1997

Bachelor of Environmental Design

Completion of undergraduate architecture degree, Faculty of Architecure, Landscape and Visual Arts, University of Western Australia. Dean: Mr Patrick Beale, Phone: +61 8 9380 1562

1987 – 1992

Guildford Grammar School

Completion of High School Certificate and Tertiary Entrance Requirements. Winner of Subject Prizes 1992 in Art and Canon-Hamilton Art prizes for sculpture and photography