Aboutmatt.net

CoreHR are a company focused on producting HR software for SMEs in Ireland, the UK and beyond. I joined them because of my previous experience with the Web stack. The software there is built on technologies like ExtJS amoung others.

My roles include feature development, design, software quality, productivity enhancements, mentoring/tutoring amoung many other things.

I have companioned personal development initiatives the chief of which is internal technical talks available to all engineering departments (development, Q/A, product/requirements, IT…etc). I have also brought about a central book library, an internal on-line catalogue of all books available to development.

Of late I have been involved in a new inititive to make the code base easier to integrate with third parties by using a technology called ORDS (Oracle Rest Data Service) to expose a REST API to select parts of the system.

In my time on the Visu team I provided quality, well measured analysis and design of sub systems within the project. I worked closely with requirements and test engineers to ensure the design and implementation, met the highest possible standard achievable at the time and met. I worked closely with management to provide demo’s to high ranking members of the Pilz company including the owner Mrs. Pilz.

The project team was smaller than the previous tool I worked on, which meant I needed to take on more responsibilities. These including a greater degrees of feature development, being more accountable to management for my time and schedule, being cognisant of performance issues and number of bugs being produced during feature development.

I was heavily involved in the set-up and running of the internal code review system using a tool called Phabricator. This involved establishing work-flow practices that would work with branching strategy in use at the time as well as keeping up to date documentation on the command line tools used to achieve all of this.

My time on PSS4000 and the sub domain IEC61131 allowed me to cut my teeth on production quality software development. It required strong communication skills on my part and demanded a willingness to; learn, grow and to fit into a dynamic and challenging software domain. Testing, test driven development and adherence to safety standards were highly important. I needed to understand complex requirement documents and had to develop a strong understanding of everyday use of version control software.

I developed a variety of features including one which provided project metrics around the size and general complexity of the projects created with this tool. This is a feature used to this day in customer support.

I was a member of the IEC61131 team which dealt with the language specification IEC61131. IEC61131 outlines 3 different languages used for programming PLC (programmable logic controllers) automation systems. My work consisted of developing semantic changes around the language making the editor more user friendly, by supplying better error messages and markers…etc.

This premise of this courses was to gain an understanding of a new and emerging industry, “The Internet of Things” (IoT). In basic terms this means embedding micro-controllers and sensors seamlessly in our everyday environment helping us by gather information from our surrounds, potentially adjusting said environment to our specific needs. From smart hand washing dispensers to smart homes.

The course covered the topics such as design and using RTOS systems, programming embedded systems such as the Sun Microsystems SPOT system and designing and building a wireless sensor node.

Electronic Systems was a course design to round off our expertises from applied electronic design. Focusing more on team working ability, research techniques, writing and communication skills.

There other large part of the course work at this stage also included learning about various networking concepts, such as TCP/IP, mesh networks, network analysis and topography. As well as deeper understanding of digital signal processing.

Applied electronic design involved getting to grip with computing, technology, programming and design. At first understand the basic workings of computer on a logic and hardware level. The course moved quickly onto more traditional low level design, that is to say programming low level microchips with assembly up to imperative programming like C. Moving in parallel to all of this we work on getting a firm understanding of programming in a broader sense, from imperative programming as I stated already to object oriented programming done mostly in C++ and Java.

User interface design was a focus of the degree also using tools like Visual Studio and Visual Basic, but the course focused much more on systems programming at this point.

Hardware design was a major feature (naturally) of the course and most of our small projects were based on building circuits (both analogue and digital) to achieve various goals and purposes.

This is a secondary school where I learned the things.

I come from a dairy farm in rural Ireland and spent many years caring for and looking after horses, cows, calves, dogs & cats.