Michael Mehmet

Helping transform both the products and the way the company builds them, drawing on accumulated knowledge and experience, to bring modern best-practices to a small but mature company. Introducing tools such as GitLab, Jenkins, and Bitwarden - all self-hosted and deployed by me - which paved the way for future integrations with new technologies also adopted by the company, like Slack and Zendesk. Building brand new, bleeding edge technology such as a real-time AI telephone receptionist, using open-weight models and dedicated inference hardware. Integrating wearable device technology into the mobile app is another example. More familiar solutions such as an API for a client using its own third-party engagement platform, and an integration with the NAB payment gateway.

Working as part of the back-end team to provide a variety of API services to a user-facing web application. Creating and managing microservices to enable communication across both internal and external resources as well as complex event-based activities in other services. Implementing a solution for producing data which can be used with industry-standard SPSS software. Pioneering the use of parallel processing across multiple, simultaneous microservices, to produce a robust data analysis tool which can handle large, complex, and ever-changing data sets — an idea which was actually born out of work with Neural Net architectures. Providing advice, ideas, and input relating to the end-to-end tech stack and potential solutions to problems, as well as best-practices, particularly with regards to documentation and management of both Business and Technical information across the organisation and accessed by various stakeholders.

Working as part of the "core" team, dedicated to back end processing of Crypto Payment Services provided to consumers and foreign currency exchanges worldwide, via API gateway — specifically looking after the Pricing engine, used across all products and needing to be 100% reliable and accurate at all times — considering very small margin of error afforded by Crypto transactions which have the potential to lead to very, very expensive mistakes. Supporting all relevant back of house processes, including proper documentation, testing and QA. Maintaining and improving solution designs for the product architecture, including scalability and resilience to high volume and optimisation of processing load. Evaluation of new technologies and ideas that could be leveraged to improve the platform in future.

Heading up one of the dev teams, including running a team of (overseas) remote devs. Encouraging test-driven development as well as modern Best Practices and coding standards. Creating many projects from scratch, working within a mix of environments including CMS environments provided by clients. Delivering Docker images for containerised deployments of TypeScript/NodeJS back end applications or custom-built CMS packages or sometimes entirely self-contained micro-sites, with a complete CI/CD solution from first git commit to fully functioning Production application running on scalable AWS/Azure infrastructure. Providing technical consultation on client briefs, including scoping and assessment of available resources.

Helping to bring a small team with a "startup" mentality up to the modern standards required by a more mature company, now at the next level. Instituting things like daily stand-ups, code reviews, proper documentation (User Stories, Acceptance Criteria, etc) and procedures such as unit and acceptance testing, and automated deployments with CI/CD. Instrumental in eradicating solutions based around quick hacks and replacing them with solutions which are properly tested and scalable, while remaining performant. Introducing microservices and distributed data storage with solutions like ElasticSearch, where they make more sense, as well as mission critical tools such as Papertrail and Jenkins — ultimately leading to much more robust systems which can easily scale up and down as needed, without falling over or losing data. Rebuilding the API from scratch, including brand new documentation — which gained positive feedback from many clients. Spearheading API integrations with industry-standard services such as Zapier and Salesforce, as a way for clients to hit the ground running with the new API.

Developing Laravel-based application as part of the back-end team on the core product, as well as heading up an entirely API-driven "Engagement" product used by clients with Gamification projects. Later moving to head up a separate bespoke Engagement project for a major corporate partner (Optus). Managing AWS resources and assets as well as CI/CD deployments to a number of different environments. Building a web-based management console to allow Engagement clients to build and maintain complex Rules, Rewards, Tiers, etc for their projects with an easy and intuitive user interface — which grew to include Single-Sign-On solutions, Wordpress plugins, and more...