Christopher Howard NLP Training

Coburg High School, Victoria, Australia

Helping companies do the things that lead to great outcomes

Restructured the company to deliver planned product and financial goals

- Appointed CTO, Head of Product, Marketing Lead
- Focused the team on delivery of core product features and cleanup of long standing issues
- Hired flexible external contracted teams to speed up delivery within product and development
- Expanded the internal marketing team to include affiliate, communications and social management, to grow new sources of customers
- Guided the team to deliver our core product by the end of 2022
- In Q1 2023 refocused the company on marketing and new customer acquisition, reducing the product and development team sizes, and reaching the financial goals in Q2

StartMail

Chief Operating Officer

Strategic Management Consultant

As a Chapter Lead at ING, I am responsible for three main functions: line management, personal and career coaching, as well as technical development of employees in my chapter. A chapter is a group of people spread across multiple teams.

I also take part in various department (tribe) initiatives, as requested by peers or as identified by myself as being useful to the tribe. One such initiative of mine was bringing project planning and management skills back into agile squads. In the changeover from tradition project management practices to Agile, some squads unfortunately lost these important abilities when the project managers departed the tribe. These lost abilities became apparent when squads had more complex projects or ones that had many external dependencies and time sensitive interactions with other squads.

Finally, I shared my technical and programming experience with the front-end developers in my tribe. Most of the web apps developed at Mortgages are small in nature, mainly forms, information display and short workflows. Small, useful web apps are great, however, there is nothing quite like a large and complex front-end project to stimulate the developers minds and to allow them to learn something new. I shared my experiences from such projects with my colleagues, exposing them to front-end architecture, reactive programming and component design, as well as new libraries and frameworks, such as VueJs, NuxtJs and Svelte.

Chapter Lead (coach, manager, front-end lead)

I joined the KPMG SOFY project to help the SOFY team come up with an approach and an architecture for the migration of a large AngularJS/NodeJS single-page application to a more modern stack. The application was approximately 100K lines of front-end (angularjs) code and 50K lines of backend (express/node) code.

It was decided early on to move the front-end to VueJS with Nuxt as the framework and the build pipeline, rebuilding all the existing features one-by-one. Vuetify was chosen as the front-end component library. The backend would remain with NodeJS/express, but be modernised and unit tests added.

I started in the role of front-end architect, as there was a lot to learn and work out, before actually starting any coding. Once the overall architecture design was done and we had prototyped the proposed implementations, I continued on in the role of technical lead (and chief engineer) for the team of 10 developers and testers in the offshore office in India. I personally ran team trainings for VueJS, Nuxt and Vuetify. I also coded most of the initial application shell and components in use by the app. It was a lot of fun.

Separate to the JS coding efforts, I also work closely with the UX team to help them create designs that actively use the selected component library (Vuetify).

Mentoring of individual team members on best practices is a weekly thing, as is going through a lot of code reviews to ensure consistency. I found myself strangely enjoying the code reviews and, I must say, have learned a lot from them. Such as, write simple code that can be understood by anyone. It's very important.

There have been a lot of interesting challenges to solve in this project to date. However, the most interesting one was how to keep both Angular and Vue versions of the app functional at the same time, and yet in separate codebases, all this transparent to the user. I solved this with an approach that can be applied to any existing web app that is to be migrated.

KPMG Netherlands

Technical Lead and Architect (JavaScript ), VueJS+Nuxt trainer, senior engineer

My most important role at Sytac, outside of my consulting duties that I perform at my clients, is that of a career coach and trainer to my colleagues. 

It started about two years ago, when our consultant managers noticed that some of our employees were leaving the company or thinking about leaving. We needed a way to identify these employees and their reasons, before they decided to leave, and to try and help them find a path that allowed them to stay with Sytac. That's when I took on the role of career coach. It has been successful to date.

In addition to coaching, I have also developed an Interview Skills Training program at Sytac that has proven to increase the hire rate of our engineers. It is a three hour training that takes our new hires and existing engineers through all the aspects of preparing for and attending a job interview with a client. It focuses on enhancing their behaviour and interpersonal skills, because they already know their technical stuff.

I am also a consultant with over 30 years experience in delivering IT projects, both software and infrastructure. I do hands on coding, team management, technical leadership, architecture design, project management and coaching of the same. Which role I perform depends largely on the client's requirements. I know it sounds like a lot and sometimes it feels like it too. However, I still enjoy doing my work, in all the various roles, and am proud to deliver successful solutions to my clients.

Currently, I specialise in full-stack web app development with VueJs, Nuxt and NodeJs on the back end. It's all JavaScript, front-end and back-end.

Sytac

Tech Lead, Team Lead, Coach, Trainer, Web App Architect, Developer

I work at the KLM Airlines FastTrack team in Amsterdam, through Sytac consulting. The KLM FastTrack team is responsible for developing custom web apps for internal use by KLM's many departments and employees. I develop web apps and set the standards we use for front-end development. I also lead the team. 

For the front-end, my team and I have been developing with Vue 2, vuex and vue-router since late 2016. Previous to that we developed apps with AngularJS, since early 2014. We use Webpack for bundling and git (BitBucket) for version control. On the backend, we use either Express, Tomcat7/Spring or Meteor, depending on the situation.

Most of the applications communicate with the backend using a REST interface that stores the data in PostgreSQL, MySQL or an Oracle database. A few apps had a Meteor backend and stored their data in MongoDB. We also use internet based tools like Codepen to prototype /mock some app designs.

- Vue2, vuex, vue-router, Material Design, Bootstrap 4, Vuetify, WebPack, Docker
- AngularJS, Angular2, Bootstrap, MeteorJS, Angular2-now
- JavaScript ES6, TypeScript, HTML5, CSS3/SCSS, GIT, GULP, NPM, Bower
- PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, REST interfaces, Server Email processing
- Single page, responsive and progressive web apps that work on desktop, tablet and mobile
- Contributing to the development of KLM's new front-end framework based on AngularJS 2
- Teaching and presenting on AngularJS at KLM

Personal:
- Presenting about VueJS at meetups
- I am the maintainer of the Angular2-now library (http://github.com/pbastowski/angular2-now)
- Migrating from AngularJS to Angular2 to VueJS

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

Tech Lead, Team Lead, Web App Developer

- AngularJS, HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3 and LESS, jQuery, GIT, CSS sprites, Analytics
- Single page, responsive Web apps that work on desktop and mobile
- CSS3 tuning for mobile phones and tablets
- AngularJS and CSS tuning for IE7, IE8 and 9, Respond.js, HTML5 shim, polyfills

I worked here as a senior developer on the brand new version of their dating platform, Flirtplek. The new version is developed fully in AngularJS on the front-end, with custom directives, custom filters, custom services, fancy routing with resolves, tracking pixels, CSS3/LESS style sheets, responsive design that works in IE7 and up, a well as mobile browsers and tablets. I developed file upload techniques that work on modern browsers as well as IE7 and up. 

Why not use jQuery plugins for file upload and other widgets? Because the combination of jQuery and AngularJS crashes IE7 and IE7 was a required browser, at least for another year. So, I modified AngularJS JQLite functions to fix a nasty bug with ng-show/ng-hide and ng-class, so that just the one Angular version can be used in all browsers, including IE7/8/9+, Chrome, FireFox, Safari, IOS Safari, Windows Phone and Android browsers. 

I debugged mobile versions of the apps using WINRE, which works really well! I realise that IOS Safari can be debugged through the OS X Desktop Safari, but I had to debug on multiple devices and WINRE does such a great job with that.

The team used GIT for version control. I can say that I know how to use git for creating, pulling, checking out, committing, branching, stashing, stash popping, diffing, mergin and hard resetting.

The back end was developed by the in-house PHP guys, who created a REST like API that my front-end app communicates with. I developed a centralised DataService that provides data-access services to the rest of my app. Communication errors are handled automatically, but are also passed through with the returned promise, for special cases.

I am able to provide samples of my AngularJS code

Project 89109 BV

Web Application Developer

In February 2013, I made the decision to return to software development full time, with a special focus on Web applications, both the front ends and the back ends. Creativity, for me, is expressed through crafting (listening, designing, implementing) new solutions for my clients. In the previous 5 years of my project management work, I never felt that I was creating anything, rather delivering things created by others. For me that was no longer enough, so, I also decided to say good bye to project management as my only role. I am a software developer. I listen. I design. I create, manage and deliver.

Having had a break of around 5 years from full-time programming, I had to catch up on the new technologies, languages, databases and paradigms. My search for new tech lead me to AngularJS, NodeJS, Express and MongoDB. Now, Node was something completely new and very exciting – event driven programming in JavaScript on the back end. Not only is Node new, but it is highly adopted by companies like Google, LinkedIn and Microsoft, for example.

Node is used to create the back end of web apps and JavaScript is its programming language. The front end of Web apps is also programmed in JavaScript. So, now I have the same language for the front end and the back end. This, of course, led me into a deep dive learning of HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, AngularJS, KnockoutJS and a less detailed exploration of EmberJS, MeteorJS, UnderscoreJS, Hoodie, WebSql, MongoDB, CouchDB, sqLite.

In summary, I am now working with and most interested in developing Web applications, using the above mentioned technologies.

Self Employed

This month
- E-mber.js and Handlebars.js
- R-uby and P-ython
- NodeJS

So, I completed a couple of R-uby intro courses and read heaps about it on web blogs. It's a nice language and easy to use. Like P-ython, it has lots of useful string and array manipulation methods built right in - no need to invent anything here. It can also be used on the Linux command line, just like P-ython, P-erl or AWK. Since I have only briefly looked into both R-ails and D-jango, I can't say much about them yet.

E-mber.js and Handlebars.js
These are some amazing client side template frameworks. Actually, handlebars is more of a JS library and E-mber is a full web app development framework with data-bound form fields and display elements, which update dynamically as the data structures that they are based on change. Incidentally, I'm sure VB had data-bound controls, way back in the 1990's. Yeah, but that was 20 years ago, so, this data-bound stuff is new. Again! So, why Handlebars and E-mber at the same time? Because E-mber depends on Handlebars to implement its client-side templating features. To understand Handlebars better, I thought it would be nice to write my own "handlebars" clone in JavaScript, so I did. The code is surprisingly short and yet it is able to expand templates just like Handlebars can, without compilers, just using native JS and some good old thinking and design.

NodeJS
While I was delving into Handlebars, I run across NodeJS once again, because another framework, Meteor, uses it. I have to say that NodeJS is awesome! 

From it's web site: 
   "Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable
    network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it
    lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across
    distributed devices."

I will be continuing deep diving into NodeJS during October. This is the future of Web App development.

Deep diving into CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery. 

CSS3 is amazing stuff. You can actually take a vanilla HTML page and then style it using a CSS3 template, turning it into something beautiful and even dynamic. Add popup menus or animations and all without using any JavaScript. This allows me, for instance, to give a web site or a web app a new look (new skin) without messing around with any of the HTML code in most cases.

JavaScript in its current ECMAscript 5.1 release is a powerful and extensible language. You can even use JavaScript to extend JavaScript itself. You want a custom method on all strings - no problem, just add the method to the String prototype and immediately all Strings, new and existing, acquire this new method in real time. Also, through the use of Node.js, JavaScript can now be used on the servers. But, I have only just started looking into Node, so, won't say much here about it.

Also played with SqLite and HTML5's new support for browser hosted (client side) data storage/persistence - it's a very nice feature. HTML5 has an API for storing data locally, so that web apps no longer have to use cookies for this purpose.

Completed the jQuery intro training on CodeCademy and experimented heavily with bits of jQuery code to see what I could achieve. jQuery is a very useful JavaScript library, if somewhat less relevant these days due to parts of its framework being natively included in the new HTML5 spec in the modern browsers. But, if I need cross-browser support, including older browsers, like from 2 years ago or so, then jQuery is still the way to go. 

Next month: A-mber.js, Handlebars.js, R-uby, R-uby on R-ails and revisiting P-ython with the D-jango web framework.

Catching up with current WEB Development Technologies

Since March 2013, I have been refreshing all my development skills. Currently catching up on LAMP suite (Linux/OSX, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python, Perl) as well as HTML5 applications, CSS3, JavaScript programming. It's all very exciting to see how the development environments have evolved and matured over the past several years. I am happy to once again call myself a programmer. It was great to do all the infrastructure project management jobs over the past several years, but for me, nothing beats the creativity needed to do software development.

Took some time off from employment to work on important personal and family matters.

Personal Time

Time off to work on personal stuff

Whatever the job requires to get the work done to the satisfaction of the customer.

Customer facing role, managing transition projects that delivered infrastructure and software deployments for an Energy Production and Trading industry customer of Schuberg Philis.

- Liaison between Schuberg engineers and the customer's business and IT departments
- Gathering work requirements from the customer's different projects and business
- Preparation of a steady stream of work for the Schuberg engineering team
- Preparation and coordination of several major cut-overs/go-lives
- Using SCRUM for planning projects and executing projects in sprints (stages)
- Attending client side project progress meetings and reporting progress
- Managing scope changes, sometimes resulting in new business
- Dependency management (external and internal), ensuring teams have work to do

Schuberg Philis

Senior Project Manager

Keywords: telco, consulting, team lead, software, deployment, PMO, 

•	Management of a program of projects to deliver, amongst other things, upgraded capacity of the mobile data systems gateway at Telstra corporation.

•	Creation of a new PMO
    -	definition of its purpose and processes
    -	definition of the PMO staff roles
    -	automation of project administration processes
    -	standardization of the project management process

•	Definition of the processes that the company follows from Sales through to Project Initiation

•	Introduction of Agile project delivery methods to the teams, resulting in
    -	improved project effort estimation and thus pricing
    -	whole team involvement and task ownership
    -	improved project status visibility and communications

•	Training Team Leads, Architects, Consultants, Managers in the basics of agile methods
    -	requirements gathering and creation of a product backlog
    -	accurate project estimation and planning using the whole team (client, 
        analysts, leads, engineers)
    -	daily team activities and responsibilities
    -	planning sprints (and using MS Project 10 Team Planner view to help)

•	Holding planning workshops with clients and internal teams

•	Team building and coaching
•	Matrix organization structure
•	Multidisciplinary teams, geographically distributed (UK, US, Australia, India)

Openwave

Senior Project Manager / Program Manager

Independent Consultant

IT Solutions Consultant

TomTom International is a manufacturer of portable navigation devices (consumer electronics).  During 2008 and 2009 TomTom were bringing to the European and the US markets a new line of revolutionary devices that offered their users very detailed and current traffic information as well as additional location based services, such as Google business search.  

I managed simultaneous and interdependent infrastructure deployment and migration projects, development projects, which delivered systems and connectivity necessary for a successful launch of the new devices in USA, UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal.  There were a lot of technical challenges to overcome, which made the delivery of the projects very rewarding.

- Identified and mitigated problems in the internal network capacity, which threatened to bring down the connectivity of the new devices to the back end systems and disrupt customers.

- Advised management teams during third party contract negotiations, which resulted in large cash savings to TomTom.

- Provided leadership in identifying, troubleshooting and solving of system problems, which saved TomTom large amounts of Euro in extra costs.

- Developed capacity measurement techniques for network and storage systems, which allowed the operations team to monitor these systems and ensure a continuity of service to TomTom's customers

- Led the design and migration of crucial real-time systems between data centres

- Worked with telecommunications companies from USA and EU countries on developing innovative data connectivity for TomTom's millions of possible simultaneously connected navigation devices

- Lead multi-disciplinary and geographically distributed teams

.

TomTom

BP Australia Melbourne

Tech Lead

- functional decomposition of business requirements
- software systems analysis
- software systems design
- software development (programming)

SMS Management & Technology

Consultant

I founded UFS in 1986 as a platform for the delivery of custom software solutions and consulting services to mechanical engineering consultancies.  The business was successful and eventually grew to include many other industries, such as Telecommunications, Transport, Energy, Banking, Government, Air Lines and Manufacturing.  

The tools of my trade are the experience and the skills that I gained during the years of working with my clients.  My clients always have my unyielding commitment to the delivery of great value solutions.

In all the assignments and projects that I did, what I enjoyed most was always:

- working together with my clients on solving their business problems and needs

- re-engineering value delivery systems to improve efficiency in time

- investigation and analysis of problems

- research and finding new ways of doing things

- innovation and renovation resulting in working solutions

- automation of processes to improve efficiency, reduce errors and reduce operating costs

- coming back to do more challenging work

Paul Bastowski