David Young

Personal Profile

years of full-time software development experience, encompassing multiple full stacks.

Expertise in web applications and services, specialising in back ends, reliability, maintainability, and system architecture.

Contact

References

Experience

Education

University of Queensland
Bachelor of Engineering (Software), 2004

Skills

• Design and implementation of reliable and maintainable solutions
• Modular approach, containing complexity with appropriate and consistent library/framework abstractions
• Advancing a culture of collaboration -
  • Consensus and context-driven solution design, critique, and risk management
  • Learning and teaching with enthusiasm
  • Code reviews promoting safety and improvement
  • Experience with remote and office-based settings
  • Customer communication to diagnose and solve problems, manage expectations, and explain complex features
  • Documentation of systems and internal processes (self-documenting where possible)
• Software Quality focus -
  • Automated testing, of appropriate integration scopes or units
  • Atomic non-breaking changes
• Responsiveness and transparency in the development process -
  • Risk management against budget overrun or divergence from stakeholder needs
  • Agile - responding to the people, the problem, and and the commercial engagement style

Technical Expertise

• Security best practices, applied with detailed understanding of threats and mitigations
• System architecture design -
  • Component and resource management with clear delineation of responsibilities and traceable ownership
  • Service and microservice delivery where appropriate, to further contain complexities and maximise flexibility and visibility
• DevOps -
  • Systematization and automation of tooling, testing, release management, deployments, and monitoring
  • Tools - TeamCity, Octopus Deploy, Azure DevOps
• Community engagement around technical approaches and emerging trends
• Platforms -
  • Targets - .NET Core 3.1, .NET Framework, Browser, Node.js, Windows, Linux, Android
  • Hosts - Docker, AWS (S3, EC2, CloudFront, etc.), Azure (Web Apps, VMs, etc.), Cloudflare
  • Frameworks - ASP.NET WebAPI, ASP.NET MVC, .NET async Tasks, React, Ractive.js, Angular, SignalR, Gulp, REST, Swagger / OpenAPI, SOAP, Cordova, Umbraco
  • Libraries - Dapper, ADO.NET, NHibernate
  • Tools - Rider, Visual Studio Code, Git, Visual Studio, ReSharper, Subversion, Vim
• Languages -
  • Extensive knowledge of C# 8, TypeScript, JavaScript ES2020, Browser DOM/​HTML/​CSS, C
  • Experience with others including Perl, Bash, Java, PHP, Python, NT Batch, Assembly, C++
• Databases -
  • Platforms - MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Redis, Elasticsearch, Memcached
  • SQL via direct querying or ORMs, automated query generation, query optimisation
  • DBA tasks - DDL design and management
  • Key-value and document stores
  • Cache design - read-driven, write-driven, ensuring availability and consistency

Achievements

• Directed projects along low-risk practical paths, producing plans and designs that were attentive to both stakeholder needs and technological conditions, and responsive to change (e.g. CarbonSim architectural design, Octopus configuration transformations)
• Delivered systems at scale that exhibited correctness, robustness, performance, and security (e.g. Telstra BigPond Music)
• Delivered user experiences that were clean and straightforward, polished, and sturdy (e.g. Ekka Ticket Checkout)
• Increased performance of complex existing codebases by orders of magnitude, gathering evidence from quantitative metrics, profilers, and monitoring data, then applying it to rework code hotspots, optimize SQL, redesign data access, and add caching (e.g. Telstra BigPond Music, Place Real Estate CMS)
• Reworked architectures to improve maintainability and enclose resource ownership, which improved performance, mitigated DoS vulnerabilities, and improved transactional behaviours (e.g. CarbonSim architectural design, Telstra BigPond Music)
• Resolved points of friction in development and deployment processes by writing and repairing tools and automation (e.g. CarbonSim deployment, Octopus Linux publishing)
• Diagnosed and fixed subtle race conditions and intermittent behaviours that caused faults in production (e.g. Octopus Deploy load balancing)