- Born 28th June 1974; British national
- Location: Surbiton, Surrey.
- Able to work in London, south-east England, or from home.
- willing to undertake domestic and international travel
- Email address: cv@darrenf.org
- Qualifications: BSc. (Hons) Computing and Information Systems, Manchester University, 1995
Key skills and experience
- 14.5 years commercial experience in the internet industry
- Experienced architect, designer, and co-author of large-scale backend systems for websites
- feed processing
- templating
- content management systems (CMS)
- publishing systems
- configuration management
- 11.5 years experience in object oriented programming (Perl 5, Python); desktop and server UNIX variants (FreeBSD, Linux), shell scripting, source control (CVS, subversion), Apache administration.
- 8 years experience in package management, release control, and message queues
- Exposure to PHP, YUI, jquery, web services, virtualisation, XHTML, WML, XSLT.
- Experienced user of collaborative software: bugzilla, RT, twiki, confluence, Jira
- Core architectural contributor to r3, a Yahoo! open source code management and internationalisation tool
- Author of django-slots, a generic scheduling system for django models; pork.py, a (file) generator which marries YAML to various python template engines; and a testbed for django's template filters hosted on Google App Engine
- 4 years experience of agile software development using scrum
- BCS/ACTT accredited trainer
Personal attributes
I am conscientious, loyal, hard-working and a fast learner, with excellent troubleshooting skills. I operate effectively on my own and in teams of different sizes, including those split across geographical borders and/or timezones; and I am an effective and persuasive communicator with a down to earth attitude.
Employment history
Yahoo!, February 2010 - present
I rejoined Yahoo! as a permanent member of staff in February 2010, as a senior engineer in the sports team. Yahoo! Sports in Europe is run in partnership with Eurosport.
Duties and responsibilities
- Jointly responsible for all backend engineering for Yahoo!'s sports sites in 5 European markets: UK, FR, DE, ES and IT, with a particular focus on platform and website stability
- Large parts of the CMS in use behind these sites are those which I (co-)wrote in a previous role here
- Development, maintenance, and support of news and data feeds
- Configuration management
- Primary coordinator for all scheduled and emergency releases
- Training/mentoring and support of new team members
Yahoo!, August 2009 - February 2010 (contract)
Duties and responsibilities
- Senior member of the European Content Integration Team.
- Responsible for over 600 3rd party data feeds across 5 European markets
- Development of new feeds
- Support and maintenance of existing feeds
- Configuration and bug-fixing of Yahoo!'s in-house CMS
Global Radio, March 2008 - May 2009
Global Radio are the UK's premier radio company and the home of the UK's leading commercial radio brands.
Global Radio boasts the number 1, 2 and 3 commercial radio brands in the UK, with Heart, Classic FM and Galaxy respectively.
Duties and responsibilities
- Member of a small team of experienced senior software engineers
- Implementing an in-house CMS from the ground up, built with Python and Django with mod_wsgi on Debian Linux. The CMS is to be used for all Global Radio websites
- Jointly responsible for all technical aspects of the Capital Radio relaunch in August 2008
- Since then the CMS has been used for the relaunched Global Radio, Choice FM, Classic FM and Heart websites.
- Member of a working group which directs CMS strategy and architecture, and has overall responsibility for Python and Django coding standards and quality
Yahoo!, September 1999 - March 2008
Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide.
Duties and responsibilities
Roles are in chronological order, oldest first
- Sole dedicated engineer for Yahoo! Sports across all European markets (18 months)
- Senior member of CMS team (5.5 years)
- Design, implementation and support of Yahoo!'s most-used bespoke CMS, comprising
- feed processing (news feeds, sport scores, weather data, etc)
- on-demand and event-driven publishing
- offline (pre-processing) templating
- internationalisation and localisation
- extensible GUI for management of production data, templates, and configuration settings
- authoring and delivery of training material to engineers throughout the world
- Technical lead in Audience Engineering, London (18 months)
- Engineering manager for Yahoo! European homepages (9 months) responsible for 3 staff, with the product in 9 markets
- Member of Yahoo! Europe Training Council; Change Management champion
Previous employers and roles
- GX Networks (now PIPEX): UNIX application engineer, 1999
- Demon Internet: NOC frontline administrator, 1998
- Netlink Internet (now Claranet): hostmaster and systems developer, 1996-1998
- Cable Internet (now Virgin Media): technical support analyst, 1996
Other relevant experience
Several services for AFC Wimbledon: author of the main supporters' messageboard WISA Chat, a (somewhat neglected) text based match updates service Matchday Updates, and I set up the software (shoutcast/icecast) behind our live audio commentary Radio WDON.
Interests
I listen to music of all genres, and am a voracious reader of non-fiction. I have a serious gadget habit (consoles, home cinema, portable electronics, ...). But mostly I love to travel, in the UK and beyond.