config.json

{
  "forenames": "Dean",
  "surname": "James",
  "profession": "Agile Software Development Engineering Manager",
  "dob": "13th January 1981",
  "gender": "Male",
  "location": "Southend, Essex",
  "citizenship": "British",
  "social": [
    {
      "label": "LinkedIn",
      "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dean-james-5b19a7324",
      "text": "linkedin.com/in/dean-james-5b19a7324"
    },
    {
      "label": "CV",
      "url": "http://xurion.github.io/cv",
      "text": "xurion.github.io/cv"
    }
  ],
  "githubUrl": "https://github.com/xurion/cv",
  "introductions": [
    "Hi! I'm Dean. I'm a passionate, customer-focused and quality-first software engineering manager, focusing on quality engineering with a broad range of skills. I have more than fifteen years experience in delivering business goals in a quality-driven Agile way, as well as nurturing teams to become the best delivery-focused units they can be.",
    "I pride myself on enabling and guiding evolution at the team level, consistently striving for a high standard of work, being good-natured, outgoing and having a good sense of humour."
  ],
  "skills": [
    "TypeScript, JavaScript, JSX",
    "React, Redux",
    "Jest, React Testing Library, Mocha, Jasmine, Chai",
    "Playwright, Cypress, WebdriverIO",
    "Behaviour & test-driven development (BDD / TDD)",
    "Gherkin / Cucumber",
    "Continuous integration & deployment",
    "Tailwind, Styled Components",
    "CSS, LESS, SCSS",
    "Node",
    "Docker",
    "NPM / Yarn",
    "SOLID principles",
    "Trunk based development",
    "Splunk, Grafana, Datadog"
  ],
  "complimentarySkills": [
    "Gherkin scenario and BDD expertise",
    "Lean Kanban evangelism",
    "Probabilistic forecasting",
    "Quality-first focus",
    "Team transparency advocate",
    "Safe-to-fail and psychologically safe nurturer",
    "Analyser of all things measurable",
    "Minimum viable product & time to market advisor"
  ],
  "me": [
    "Software engineering has always been one of my core passions.",
    "For well over a decade, I have focused heavily on the sustainable development of test-validated software at sustained pace. I'm a data-driven thinker and I use my strong Agile analytical and organisational skills to drive technically excellent and sustainable solutions that my team and I build."
  ],
  "meReadMore": [
    "I am able to work on my own, but I believe teamwork trumps almost all siloed approaches.",
    "I am lively, outgoing and approachable. I have a passion for video games (especially RPGs), developing software on pet projects (Lua is a hobby of mine!) and cooking in my custom-built kitchen, having wanted to be a chef when I was younger (before I got my hands on a PC!).",
    "I'm a fan of electronic music and enjoy attending music festivals.",
    "My person-to-person and written skills are excellent and I always try to approach my work with enthusiasm and adaptability."
  ],
  "experience": [
    {
      "jobTitle": "Software Engineering Manager",
      "otherTitles": ["Senior Software Development Engineer III"],
      "companyName": "Tesco Technology",
      "companyLogo": "tesco.png",
      "startDate": 1599469200000,
      "about": [
        "Lead a team tasked with creating and maintaining various in-store till systems, including self checkout and attended tills whilst supporting UK production stores via a housekeeping initiative.",
        "New till systems were rolled out to over 35,000 tills running in nearly 3,400 stores across the UK, severing a costly dependency on a third party EPOS solution."
      ],
      "aboutReadMore": [
        "A high level of unit test coverage is in place using Jest, as well as an end-to-end test setup utilising Playwright. As the project matured, I lead the need to evolve our ways of working in many different areas, including production support as well as how we work internally with other teams.",
        "Systems are written in TypeScript using React, Redux, Node & Docker, taking advantage of trunk-based development with an Azure continuous integration pipeline."
      ]
    },
    {
      "jobTitle": "Senior Software Development Engineer III",
      "companyName": "Kobalt Music",
      "companyLogo": "kobalt.svg",
      "startDate": 1544432400000,
      "endDate": 1581094800000,
      "about": [
        "Part of a team responsible for overseeing the rollout of a two-year front-end project, as well as other client-facing applications, including the shared company front-end component library."
      ],
      "aboutReadMore": [
        "Championed the adoption of behaviour-driven development and transformed the entire work planning approach to be customer-focused with the aid of Gherkin scenarios.",
        "Technology primarily included TypeScript, React and Redux. Built and maintained BFFs for each of our front-end applications, maintained existing APIs and set up monitoring for server-side as well as instrumentation to monitor how our customers used our platform.",
        "Also lead a number of pair programming and system design interviews."
      ]
    },
    {
      "jobTitle": "Team Lead",
      "otherTitles": [
        "Agile Delivery Manager",
        "Senior Front-End Software Engineer"
      ],
      "companyName": "BrightTALK",
      "companyLogo": "brighttalk.svg",
      "startDate": 1301313600000,
      "endDate": 1530532800000,
      "about": [
        "Lead the team that created BrightTALK's main client-facing Symfony2 and AngularJS stack. My role focused on the development of our front-end as well as being an Agile servant-leader for the team and delivering scalable test-covered solutions."
      ],
      "aboutReadMore": [
        "Retired various legacy products and was required to plan and implement new front-end stacks, which included moving away from old Backbone applications with manual builds and no test coverage, to modern React/Redux applications fully covered by Jest unit tests and automated Behaviour-driven Gherkin scenarios using WebdriverIO."
      ],
      "additionalSkillList": {
        "title": "Agile responsibilities included:",
        "skills": [
          "Enable and coach the team to utilise Kanban to balance capacity against demand and prevent burnout.",
          "Analyse team bottlenecks and adapt the team approach as required, using Little's Law, queueing theory and the theory of constraints.",
          "Track team delivery cadence with cycle times and lead times to identify issues early.",
          "Facilitate team ceremonies and reduce feedback loops with face-to-face conversations.",
          "Encourage a safe-to-fail culture for developers to thrive with psychological safety.",
          "Protect the team from external interruption and unnecessary context switching.",
          "Measure the cost of delay to reveal undeniable need for change.",
          "Help the team define explicit policies for each stage of work in a team's process.",
          "Radiate any and all information out in the open so the status of things is always evident to the team and stakeholders.",
          "Coach the team to focus on customer needs as a priority, providing them the opportunity to help shape what a product looks like and offers.",
          "Coach the team to ship minimum viable products to reduce both time to market and cost of delay.",
          "Work with business people to introduce Gherkin scenarios in order for teams, developers and the business to speak the same consistent language before, during and after each project."
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "jobTitle": "Front-end Team Lead",
      "companyName": "Bettor.com",
      "formerCompanyName": "IbetX Ltd.",
      "companyLogo": "bettor.png",
      "startDate": 1207569600000,
      "endDate": 1300449600000,
      "about": [
        "Lead the front-end software development and graphic design team. Line managed one dedicated designer and one dedicated JavaScript, CSS and HTML engineer."
      ],
      "aboutReadMore": [
        "Heavily involved in a two-year website and brand overhaul, built in Zend framework, jQuery and WebSocket technology. Included payment gateways, real-time user-to-user betting interfaces, social networking tools and sports news feeds."
      ]
    },
    {
      "jobTitle": "Software Engineer",
      "otherTitles": ["Web Designer"],
      "companyName": "SQ Digital",
      "formerCompanyName": "SearchQuest UK Ltd.",
      "companyLogo": "sq.svg",
      "startDate": 1108987200000,
      "endDate": 1207310400000,
      "about": [
        "Responsible for the majority of a large number of projects from beginning to end. Taking bespoke customer requirements, designing PhotoShop layouts (some including full branding), developing the PHP back-end and JS/HTML/CSS front-end, setting up hosting via IIS and Fasthosts, as well as customer support."
      ],
      "aboutReadMore": []
    }
  ]
}