Consulting

I provide consulting services on a wide range of software engineering solutions. I specialise in functional programming languages, backend infrastructure and database engineering.

Please feel free to contact me for a quote, or a discussion about how I can assist your team with your software solutions.

Current clients

  • Route2 Sustainability is an ESG accounting company that has developed a sustainability metric called Value2Society. This system enables businesses to quantify their use and investment in different capital stock throughout their value chain. By integrating client data with a large corpus of academic research and data, Route2 guides businesses toward sustainable models.

    Route2 is currently in the process of transitioning from a consultancy to a more software-oriented business model. This involves encoding domain-specific knowledge using an internal DSL and rules engine. The backend engine is responsible for parsing, validating, evaluating, and reporting on the accounting indicators written in this DSL.

    As head of development at Route2 I lead the software side of the company. This has included:

    • Developing the DSL used internally, as well as the Haskell rules engine which processes scripts written in the DSL.
    • Revamping the entire backend, including the introduction of a PostgreSQL database which increased performance by a factor of more than 100.
    • Manging the DevOps pipeline, using GH actions, AWS, and Nix, which I introduced to the codebase.
    • Designing the backend of the client-facing website.
    • Development of CLI tools used internally, working with coworkers on other teams and responding to feature requests.
    • Introducing automated test suites for the entire codebase.
    • Working with external contractors to develop the frontend of the website.

Former clients

  • CentralApp is a Belgian company that develops SaaS solutions for SMEs. They offer a smart website builder, local SEO, and other useful solutions for restaurants, hotels and other small businesses to expand their customer base.

    By taking advantage of the excellent safety guarantees offered by the Haskell type system, and a bespoke asynchronous API gateway for distributed architectures, the CentralApp engineers have easily scaled their infrastructure to support over 4,000 companies and serve over 1,000,000 API requests per hour.

    They also build and deploy their entire infrastructure using Nix, which provides excellent reliability, reproducible build environments, and atomicity.

    During my time working with CentralApp, some major projects that I led or directly contributed to included:

    • Automating the purchase and transfer of client domains, saving Customer Service a lot of time in the onboarding process.
    • Hunting down and fixing a memory leak in the asynchronous API gateway which was causing random outages.
    • Upgrading the entire codebase from GHC 8.6.5 to 9.6.5.
    • Adding support for WebP images to the CRM, reducing S3 storage requirements by up to 70%.
    • Several major improvements to the CICD pipepline, including automatic deployment to the staging environment; automatic validation of AWS ECS task definitions; deploying Lambdas on AWS using Nix and Docker; and much more efficient caching of Nix build artifacts.
    • Automatic derivation of Opaleye (PostgreSQL) instances using Template Haskell, saving a lot of error-prone boilerplate.
    • Implementing type-safe DNS records, which gave stronger guarantees for client domains.
    • Integrating a new analytics provider into the user interface.
    • Numerous enhancements to the CRM and API.
    • Several integrations with 3rd-party APIs, such as AWS, Google, Meta, Instagram, Pirsch and Partoo.
    All of these projects were driven by business requirements and customer feedback. I worked directly with the CentralApp frontend designers to plan new features, as well as the Customer Service team in order to prioritise the features and UX improvements that would accelerate growth. In addition to implementing these features I also wrote extensive test suites for all of them, including unit testing, integration testing, and property-based testing using QuickCheck and HTest.

About me

I was born in the UK and attended the University of Oxford, where I studied Mathematics for my bachelor's and Mathematical and Theoretical Physics for my master's degree. After graduating I joined the Space Studies Program at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France.

I then moved to Munich, Germany to start a job working as a contractor at the German Space Agency (DLR). I worked as a Systems Controller, monitoring and maintaining the ground systems that allow research bodies, universities and private companies to communicate with their experiments onboard the Columbus module of the ISS.

In the Spring of 2021 I started working as a scientififc researcher at the Technical University of Munich. I worked on the CiLoCharging project, using agent-based simulation to study the effects of delivery vehicle electrification in logistic fleets. I also conducted my own research into digital privacy, specifically on interdependent privacy and game-theoretic approaches.

Since April 2023 I've been working as a freelance software engineer. Head over to the consulting section for more details. I now live in Brussels, Belgium.

In my free time I like to work on my own software projects. I love exploring new languages, libraries and frameworks, especially ones that change the way I think about programming. One day I would love to design my own programming language or OS. I also enjoy playing piano, reading, watching films and TV, and travelling.

You can download my CV here.