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Steve Donaghy

Development Manager and nerd

Blue Prism

Biography

Hi, I'm Steve.

My first experience tinkering with technology was probably when I reprogrammed the Satellite receiver to receive additional channels. My Dad was furious when he caught me, but he soon got over it when he realised just how many more channels there were. I was 8 at the time.

It was inevitable that I'd go on to tinker with real computers, figuring out what makes them tick and before you know it I'm a developer.

Soon I'd go on to make my mark designing software for testing Chip & Pin devices; large multi-million £ e-commerce sites and even the odd dev-talk.

You'd think I'd stop there, but no, the Internet of Things happened so when I'm not working, I'm busy trying to get my vacuum cleaner to talk to my cat-flap (No, really).

I don't just like technology, I absolutely ❤ it. There's probably something wrong with me.

Interests

  • Technology
  • Development
  • Gaming
  • Baking
  • Cats

Education

  • BSc Computer Games Technology, 2009

    Liverpool John Moore's University

Skills

Programming Languages

C++/CLI, C#, VB.net, Powershell, Bash, Javascript

Markup Languages

HTML, JSON, XML, YAML, TOML, Markdown

.net

.net 4.8, asp.net, Entity Framework, .net core 3.1+, Windows Forms, Xamarin

Cloud

Azure, AWS

Devops

CI/CD, Release Management, Azure Devops (VSTS), ELK stack, Prometheus

Containers

Docker, Kubernetes

IoT

Home Assistant, Z-Wave, Zigbee

Everything else…

Jira, Confluence, git, PlantUML

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Development Manager

Blue Prism

Feb 2021 – Present Warrington
The Development Manager role at Blue Prism involves managing a team of development team leads, coordinating the QA Lead, product managers, BA's and other business stakeholders.

  • Drive a collaborative working relationship between local and remote team members (through KPIs, etc.)
  • Make system design and decisions on current generation and green-field projects, involving and collaborating with the rest of the development team.
  • Owning the software delivery across the entire SDLC lifecycle, end-to-end, and have software delivery management responsibilities
  • Work with the Director of Engineering and the team to consistently move the software development process forward in terms of agility
  • When in a sprint team, work closely alongside product owners, developers, QA, etc. to ensure epics/user stories are delivered to high quality and pragmatically.
  • Research and validate emerging technologies for suitability against technology ecosystesm
  • Highlight requirements for Development Team infrastructure and tooling
  • Working with other Engineering dept leads,internal and external to plan, execute and deliver across a product release.
  • Promote opportunities for process and working practice improvements
  • Work hand-in-hand with other Blue Prism development teams to promote joined-up thinking and a #oneblueprism mindset
 
 
 
 
 

Development Team Lead

Blue Prism

Apr 2020 – Jan 2021 Warrington
The Development Team Lead role at Blue Prism involved managing a team of developers, working alogisde a sprint team and coordinating with other teams within the business.

  • Team appraisals, recruitment, line management responsibilities
  • Make system design and decisions on current generation and green-field projects, involving and collaborating with the rest of the development team.
  • Develop application architecture that is scalable, reliable, available and manageable
  • Work with the Development Manager and the team to consistently move the software development process forward in terms of agility
  • When in a sprint team, work closely alongside product owners, developers, QA, etc. to ensure epics/user stories are delivered to high quality and pragmatically.
  • Provision and maintenance of skills assessment within the team.
  • Highlight requirements for Development Team infrastructure and tooling
 
 
 
 
 

Technical Lead

Vaultex

Jul 2019 – Mar 2020 Birchwood
The Technical Lead role at Vaultex involved managing a team of developers, coordinating with testers, product owners, BA's and other business stakeholders.

  • Rebuilt a team from the ground up.
  • Coached and mentored Junior, Mid and Senior developers.
  • Adopted several legacy projects with zero documentation.
  • Built CI/CD pipelines for said legacy projects.
  • Instrumental in the “Path to Live” project to put development standards in place across several teams.
 
 
 
 
 

Technical Architect

The Lead Agency

Mar 2019 – Jun 2019 Liverpool
The Technical Architect role was created to take responsibility for system architecture, code quality and development process across the TLA development teams.

  • Managing, coaching and training team members of all levels.
  • Systems architecture, ensuring all future designs are consistent in approach and quality.
  • Technology Selection, including ownership of the Tech Radar.
  • Promoting self-improvement, such as via brown bag lunches.
  • Line Management of all intern and junior staff within the busines, mentoring them and teaching them good practices.
 
 
 
 
 

Engagement Team Manager

The Lead Agency

Jul 2017 – Mar 2019 Liverpool
The engagement team was tasked with building and maintaining user-facing sites like Carkeys.co.uk, and askaprice.com, as well as the publisher systems, marketing systems, property valuation tools and more.

  • Managing, coaching and training team members of all levels.
  • Building, architecting and delivering major projects using a variety of cutting edge. technology, such as Containers, Machine-Learning etc.
  • Organizing and running open days and giving presentations to local tech groups, extending the brand awareness of the company.
  • Deprecating older legacy tech in favour of modern solutions using Umbraco, rearchitecting our cloud approach and migrating from on-premise TFS to VSTS (Now Azure DevOps).
 
 
 
 
 

Senior Developer

Amaze

Oct 2016 – Jul 2017 Liverpool
  • Working on major client sites, such as Virgin Trains East Coast (now LNER) and Childline.
  • Heavy use of asp.net 4.5
  • Dealing directly with clients to scope out existing and future work.
  • Tying into CRM systems, such as Dymanics
  • Tying into contact systems such as Genesys
 
 
 
 
 

Development Team Manager

ICC Solutions

Jul 2011 – Sep 2016 Liverpool
Responsibilities include:

  • Updating, supporting and maintaining software solutions and new systems.
  • Provided systems maintenance and support.
  • Guided developers to employ better working practices; clean up our stagnant codebase; work together more efficiently and implement the systems required to manage all of the above.
  • Using legacy applications written in C++ with MFC all the way up to various .net programs written in VB.net, C# and C++/CLI.
  • Migrated the code base from SVN to git; Set up continuous integration using TFS Set up an internal issue tracking system (JIRA) and put processes in place for agile development workflows (including spearheading the introduction of a QA team/process); Set up an internal documentation system (Confluence); Created file upload portal using NancyFx with Razor views and RESTful backend systems using ASP.net core and MVC 6; Merged previously-forked codebases into a singular codebase, then began migrating fragmented codebases to a consistent codebase built with C# using an N-tier architectural design.

Projects

bcrypt.net Core

At the release of .net core 1.0, there was no way to trivially use bcrypt password hashing. A .net library existed, but it had been abandoned by the author.

I took it upon myself to port this library to .net core. I have been maintaining it ever since and it is currently the most popular bcrypt library for .net core!

Contact

  • Liverpool, Merseyside