Industry Leadership

So far, I have explained my knowledge and experience with respect to documenting and developing software products. This section outlines my leadership experience, including: speaking experience, examples where I have engaged in public discussion and details of how I have influenced others.

Describe any speaking experience at industry events and conferences.

During the course of my software development career, I have conducted product demonstrations of key features which I have developed for each sprint cycle. I have demonstrated new product features to target audiences, including: management, developers and users of all levels. I have also conducted demonstrations remotely via Google Meet and Zoom. Demonstrations include: overview of APIs, installations and case study applications for knowledge sharing.

As a teacher, I have prepared learning materials and tutorial exercises for programming, database design and systems analysis and design. I have delivered these in lectures and demonstrations to undergraduate students. Furthermore, within the local education college I was responsible for specifying an inventory of hardware to enable building Raspberry Pi units for use within the course. Subsequently, I conducted a demonstration to enable teaching staff and course leaders to setup and configure the Raspberry Pi.

During my PhD, I submitted technical papers for presentation at international conferences to a variety of large audiences. This involved presenting an overview of my research paper, in addition to analysing and evaluating results.

Are you engaged in public discussion, for example through speaking, writing or even social media) about software and technology? What areas of technology do you focus on?

As a software developer, I have engaged in public forums, asking questions and raising issues on Stack Overflow and GitHub discussions. My questions typically range from subject areas such as programming languages and library usage.

I have a personal software repository that implements a Blazor server dashboard page to display motion detection notifications from a webcam stream. Blazor provides the bUnit testing library. I posted a support question on GitHub discussions relating to correct usage of the library for providing an integration/functional testing context. Consequently, after discussion I developed a reusable test library for use with an in-process generic ASP.NET Core host. Please take a moment to read through the discussion and the readme file for the repository that I developed.

I have developed a Ruby Gem to allow developers to lint a GitLab CI yaml file. I encountered an issue when developing and testing. For unit testing with RSpec, I wanted to mock standard input arguments to test the command line interface. However, after discussion on Stack Overflow, I found that the Ruby RSpec test runner appends test parameters to standard input.

In some cases, I have raised a question, discovered the answer and then posted a solution of my findings. For example, I asked a question on Stack Overflow concerning how to connect to a Mosquitto MQTT broker using TLS from an MQTTnet client on MacOS. I later discovered, at the time of writing, that TLS v1.3 was not supported with MQTTnet on MacOS. Subsequently, I posted my findings as a Stack Overflow answer.

What influence have you had on others (not just your immediate colleagues) in the industry, through your speaking, writing or other work?

I have some GitLab repositories that use CI pipelines. Occasionally, I would commit a .gitlab-ci.yml file containing syntax errors. These would break the CI build.

GitLab provides a web form interface, available per project, for linting. However, this started to be cumbersome and became a candidate for automation via the GitLab API and git hooks. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the free plan for gitlab.com did not feature pre-receive git server hooks. These could prevent pushes containing invalid .gitlab-ci.yml files.

Git provides a pre-commit hook that runs for staged files on the local development environment. While usage of local git hooks is not easily enforced, I decided that this would be better than the alternative. Subsequently, I developed a Ruby gem and pre-commit hook to allow developers to automate linting of a .gitlab-ci.yml file for local commits. At the time of writing the Ruby gem has 2,534 downloads.

Furthermore, as a developer, I have asked questions in community forums and GitHub discussion groups concerning software library usage. In some cases, this has piqued interest with the library developer or project maintainer. This has resulted in requesting show and tell examples of scenarios for product usage. Please take a moment to read through this discussion as an example.