Ashley Sheridan​.co.uk

Parkopedia

At Parkopedia I managed a team across a couple of countries, helping to set the goals of the team and individuals, manage their performance, and help direct focus across projects. Another aspect of my work here is to help set team goals, setting up objectives to help the team fulfill company deliverables, and to foster a set of better standards within the team. My work in this area also includes mentoring less senior developers, helping them across a variety of technical topics, such as design patterns, unit testing, and SQL optimisation, among others.

I'm still very much involved in the technical side of work here, writing mostly PHP, Javascript/Typescript, and MySQL, leading by example with best practices with regards to clean, testable code. As well as this, I'm helping to maintain the AWS infrastructure to ensure the uptime and response times our partners and clients expect, and to ensure we operate as efficiently as possible, utilising AWS services like S3, EC2, RDS, CloudFront, and GuardDuty. Part of this includes monitoring our RDS setup to ensure smooth performance, and analysing ways in which the various teams interact with the data, creating and implementing plans to prevent data access issues.

Livedrive

I joined Livedrive as a senior developer and progressed into the role of Web team lead, managing a team across 4 time zones, and helping to maintain and develop their online portals and websites. As well as managing my team, I would also get involved in development, continuing my Angular (Typescript), C#, and PHP work developing new features and maintaining existing ones. I would ensure code was thoroughly covered by tests using PHPUnit, Nunit, and Jasmine, and followed industry standard best practices.

One other thing I've been doing here is helping push accessibility in all areas at Livedrive and help spread awareness to the parent and sibling companies. It's a topic I'm extremely keen on, and I ensure I stay as up-to-date as I can. This has led me to write more about accessibility, which resulted in being asked by parent company J2 to give a talk on accessibility, which was delivered to employees spread across IGN, Humble Bundle, PC Magazine, Ookla, and What to Expect, among others.

TMW Unlimited

I worked at a top agency called TMW, where I was employed as a senior web developer. Whilst this mostly involved building and maintaining websites and applications written in PHP, I also worked on a variety of other projects involving front-end technologies, and C++ on Arduinos.

As well as working on a variety of CMSs like WordPress and Joomla, and frameworks such as Laravel and CodeIgniter, part of my job was to act as tech lead on projects and put together documentation for internal and external use alike. I was also trained as (and hold a certificate for being) an internal auditor, which involves analysing processes throughout the company in order to meet ISO 27001 requirements.

During my last year there my role grew to encompass more tasks. I managed the majority of LAMP deployments, writing build scripts and setting up environments, I was the head of the PHP Guild at TMW, and I took the tech lead role on more projects. This allowed me to build a lot of skills outside of my main area of focus. I also looked after their SonarQube setup for PHP.

Them London

I worked at the agency called Them for just over two years. The work was very varied, and often ran to tight deadlines, but I didn't let this affect the quality of my work and I made sure I gave each project by best effort whether it be a simple HTML email or a bespoke multi-language website.

The sheer diversity of the work did mean I was often able to work with new and exciting technologies, such as 2m wide touchscreens for a trade show. While most of the websites were built around a CodeIgniter framework, there have been occasions when that didn't fit the requirements, so some things were completely custom, such as a data importer I wrote for importing and managing the email marketing data for Energizer Europe and Wilkinson Sword UK. I've also built mobile websites for Energizer, Wilkinson Sword and co-worked on a couple of mobile sites for Bupa.

Mixed Freelance

Between March 2009 and September 2010 I worked for several places in a freelance capacity: Home.corp, PUA Training, Vice Style (a part of Vice Magazine), and Opta Sports. My work as a freelancer was extremely varied, rebuilding Flash websites to be accessible and creatively overcoming issues with fonts when the iPhone was just emerging, through to custom PHP frameworks responsible for dealing with huge amounts of sport fixture data.

Mixed Permanent

My first two permanent jobs were at HSBSG Design Ltd and blue Post Productions (now Prime Focus Ltd). My work at the first involved building many small microsites, some based on a custom CMS I wrote at the time which wasn't based on a framework. At the latter I worked on a variety of projects, from a web interface to an FTP server with video transcoder, through to a rebuild of a ColdFusion website into PHP, and several smaller microsites.