Simon Rycroft

Work Experience

Starling Bank, London (Feb 2023 – Present)

Full stack software engineer. Additional information to be provided in due course.

Cancer Research UK, London. (Nov 2015 – Jan 2023)

Tech Lead - Events Registration Platform (Jul 2022 – Present)

Re-architecting the infrastructure behind the Events platform and improving the engineering practices associated with the product. This will involve the introduction of Infrastructure as Code using Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Cloud Development Kit (CDK) and Continuous Integration using GitHub Actions. I have already implemented in GitHub Actions, PHP Static analysis using PHPStan and Rector, and code style checks using PHP_CodeSniffer and Rector.

The platform will also be rewritten to become a Next.js/React front end with a Symfony REST API backend, following the principles I already set up whilst leading the development of the Fundraising Platform.

Tech Lead - Fundraising Platform (Feb 2016 – Jun 2022)

Lead Developer and technical lead of the charity's online giving platform. Re-architected the platform from a purely Drupal proof of concept, to a Symfony REST API backend with a React/Next.js front end.

Improved many of the processes that the engineering team were involved with including implementing CI/CD, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, and Test Automation. This was done using GitHub Actions, AWS CDK, Cypress, Docker and other tools, all effectively driven by committing to a repository.

Senior Drupal Developer (Nov 2015 – Jan 2016)

Senior Drupal developer working on Cancer Research UK's digital platform. Helped to develop a new Events ticketing platform, primarily the Drupal front end, allowing the charity to fully customise the selling of tickets for events. I implemented a Drupal "form controller" module, that made the process of creating multiple page forms much simpler and quicker. This ended up being used in multiple products, including the Drupal part of the Fundraising Platform.

Natural History Museum, London. (Apr 2007 – Oct 2015)

Scratchpads Lead Developer and System administrator (Feb 2014 – Oct 2015)

Further developed the Scratchpads, and continued to provide support and maintenance. I rebuilt the production and development environment infrastructure of the Scratchpads servers using Chef, including the ability to add extra databases and application servers simply by running a single command.

ViBRANT Technical Work-package leader (Dec 2010 – Jan 2014)

Managed the integration of the technical products of ViBRANT, an EU funded project with seventeen partners across ten countries. Also oversaw a team of four developers, closely monitoring progress, and ensuring that all targets and requirements of the project were being met.

Implemented an Aegir installation for managing our 500+ Drupal sites. Developed additional Drupal modules, a number of which have been released to the Drupal community under my Drupal account.

Gave presentations on ViBRANT, eMonocot and Scratchpads to the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing.

Presented the Scratchpads project at the TDWG 2013 conference in Florence, Italy.

EDIT Scratchpads Developer (Apr 2007 – Nov 2010)

Lead developer of the Scratchpads project which has been funded by the EDIT Project. Work carried out so far has involved the development of a number of custom Drupal modules to enable scientists to enter data on to a website.

Directly supported NHM scientists in the creation of their own Scratchpads and created the original Scratchpads website.

Gave numerous presentations on Scratchpads including to TDWG in Perth, Australia and TDWG in Montpellier, France.

University of Glasgow/University of Florida, Glasgow. (Apr 2005 – Apr 2007)

This was an unusual position in that I was working for the University of Florida, but located at the University of Glasgow. Worked on the development of a web accessible database called Biocorder which is to be used for the curation of specimen data. The project embraced cutting edge semantic web technologies, attempting to push the availability of biological specimen data to the semantic web. This included extensive use of RDF, LSIDs/GUIDs, RSS/Atom and the Opensearch protocol.

Dept. Computer Science, Florida State University, USA. (Dec 2004 – Mar 2005)

Having taken part in a meeting related to the work I'd completed with Dr V. Smith, I was asked if I would be able to contribute towards a similar project, Morphbank, at Florida State University. The work involved me aiding in the initial development of the project, including the database design, and first drafts of the website. This work went well, with an extended contract being offered, but unfortunately I had already committed myself to returning to the UK and my subsequent job.

Dr V. Smith, University of Glasgow. (Sep 2003 – Mar 2004)

Enhanced the functionality of the online image database I produced during my M.Sc. dissertation, developing it to a final working solution. The work carried out was submitted as a coauthored paper to the Journal of Bioinformatics, describing the key features of the system. This database became a valuable tool for archival of specimen images used in phylogenetic and biodiversity research. It was also incorporated into a scientific research grant concerning the development of distributed web based tools for the bioinformatics research community.

Dept. Immunology, University of Tokyo, Japan. (Jun – Sep 2001)

This was a summer work experience placement that I arranged in order to help me with the course I was studying. The work involved the running of my own project investigating the expression of a number of genes in specific cells of mice. As well as the important experience I gained in my subject field, I also gained an immense amount of experience living within a different culture and country.

Postlet, Sourceforge project (Sep 2004 – 2017)

Postlet was a project I created, originally on Sourceforge - a popular open source software website - that resulted in me creating a powerful, and popular Java applet for the uploading of files to a remote server.