12/2000 - 11/2001 (Permanent)	ICL Titanium House, Braehead Business Park, Glasgow
Job title : Lead Software Engineer
07/1999 - 12/2000 (Permanent)	The Automobile Association. Fanum House, Erskine Harbour.
Job title : Senior Systems Specialist

I was a member of an eight-person team responsible for the development and maintenance of a proprietary system that administers vital business data relating to breakdown cover and contracts.

The software comprises of a Windows NT GUI client and an NT server communicating via proprietary middleware, operating via a firewall. Data is stored in an Ingres database and accessed using embedded SQL within C++ code. Large data inserts and amendments are carried out using NT batch tasks scheduled via third-party software.

All of the code is written in C++ and compiled using DevStudio 5.0.

Whilst involved in all of the aspects of the source code, my main responsibilities were the Windows GUI and the data loading code.

The GUI is MFC based and dialog driven, containing several bespoke controls designed to integrate with the data objects retrieved from the database. It has been my responsibility to write any new controls.

Data is supplied in many file formats and by many suppliers. Each of these different formats had a dedicated loader written in C. I have rewritten the entire loading suite in C++ to use base classes. As a result the loading process now comprises of two parts; a converter and a loader. A single converter program converts each of the data formats on a record by record basis into an intermediate file format. A single load process is then invoked to load the records from this intermediate file directly into the database

As well as development work I was tasked with revising the documentation standards apropos class design. This involved extensive use of the SELECT design tool, particularly with regard to reverse engineering the existing code. As a result I was required to spend time liaising with Princeton Softech to iron out some of the bugs with their reverse engineering tool. Unfortunately this exercise was not, ultimately, successful due to time and cost constraints

Latterly at ICL I was seconded onto another team. My remit was to bolster their MFC skills and "fast track" a particular development stream. The work was carried out using C++ under the Devstudio 6.0 environment. Whilst in this team I acted as mentor to the other team members, helping them improve their overall design and code knowledge.