About Me
Hi, I'm Hugh - a software engineer from Adelaide, Australia. I've worked as a software engineer professionally since 2015. Throughout my career I've worked in many different fields and industries, allowing me to refine my skills over a wide range of problem domains: from analysing and enriching unstructured textual data, to building a real-time video analysis platform in the e-sports domain.
I am experienced in the full stack of development including provisioning and monitoring systems, developing backend and cloud services, and building and deploying websites to communicate to all of these services.
Throughout my work I've become proficient in many different programming paradigms, including functional programming, object-oriented programming, and the techniques and design patterns that come with them. I've worked closely alongside many data scientists, and attented courses to further my own knowledge in the field.
I'm passionate about producing high quality software by adapting to best practices for the project at hand, utilising clean architecture and modern language features.
Work
I've been fortunate to have worked across multiple distinct industries in my career. Each has come with its own unique challenges and has allowed me to grow my skillset in several challenging domains. Below are some examples of the types of work I've been involved in.
Worked on a platform doing real-time analysis of video games.
Integrated machine learning models to detect heroes from their model. Used OCR to parse and interpret textual elements of the game and plot their change over time.
I've done lots of work in data visualisation - interactive graphs, figures, tables and data exploration.
Employment
A work history including companies I have worked full time for, or as a contractor.
Software Team Lead
Amplified Intelligence - Adelaide, Australia, 2020 - 2022
I designed, architected and built AttentionTRACE (a SaaS platform) for Amplified to provide a view of our data to customers around the world. This project included a custom user and feature management system, and later an API endpoint for programmatic users.
During this time I also modernised and rebuilt pieces of our collection infrastructure, as well as extending the capability to capture new platforms.
As the team grew I also oversaw the following:
- Introducing agile practices, fortnightly planning meetings
- Interviewing new software hires
- Coding standards and workshops
Software Engineer
Amplified Intelligence - Adelaide, Australia, 2019 - 2020
I joined Amplified as a freelancer to assist in their quickly scaling business - as a second pair of hands on the software engineering team.
- Reintroduced standup daily meetings
- Automated critical business systems to improve delivery speed and accuracy to clients
- Reviewed and documented existing machine learning pipeline
- Introduced software team standards - mandatory code review, automated testing
I developed a new customer facing product from scratch which connected our business data with a web interface, allowing customers to query and filter our data live.
Software Engineer - Freelance
Num8erlust, Adelaide, Australia, 2019
I developed a demonstrator application for visualising a company's financial data.
This consumed real-world data exported from global accounting software. From the data it calculated and displayed real financial-standard KPIs, and interactive charts - which were both able to select from historic 'slices' of data. This demonstrator also offered multiple user 'types', which offered different views and functionality per the use case.
Software Engineer
Gamurs Pty Ltd, Adelaide, Australia, 2018 - 2019
Helped to build GamerAI - a computer vision platform for reviewing and analysing various e-sport titles. GamerAI is a tool which professional and casual gamers alike use to automatically capture footage of their gameplay. The footage is analysed using our computer vision models, and the resultant data and videos uploaded to distributed cloud storage.
Key events which occurred during the match are identified and placed in a decentralised search engine such that we are able to provide meaningful statistics from the data and display it on our web frontend in a user-friendly manner.
Some skills and technologies I developed during my time at Gamurs included:
- Using F# to build a .NET Core desktop application
- Fable (F# to Javascript + React) to build a responsive web interface
- Elasticsearch to index and aggregate data from user’s matches
- Integrating computer vision models to analyse frames from games
Other skills included:
- Utilising serverless computing to provide a scalable product
- Buildkite CICD for automated deployment
- Functional reactive programming for both the UI and backend code
Software Engineer
Data to Decisions CRC, Adelaide, Australia, 2017 - 2018
As an engineer on the Beat the News R&D program I was primarily involved in developing and extending data pipelines. This included building data ingestion libraries, classifying and adapting data to a meaningful representation, and indexing the data to make it searchable.
In conjunction with the pipelines I helped develop a robust front-end for exploring and analysing this data.
Many components in this system were built as microservices, which provided me with valuable DevOps experience - as much of our infrastructure was self-managed and provisioned.
I used a broad range of technologies such as: Elasticsearch, Java (Spring Boot), Angular 2+, Javascript, Typescript, Git, Maven, Python, PostgreSQL, Linux servers among others.
Academic Tutor
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia, 2016
Prepared class plans aligning with the curriculum for a fortnightly tutorial held for students enrolled in Algorithm Design & Data Structures. Presented to the class showing live coding, providing resources and taking questions.
Practical Supervisor
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia, 2015 - 2016
Assisting students with algorithm design and data structures in C++ as a practical supervisor. Conducted practical examinations, and marked and provided weekly feedback for assignments.Assisting students with algorithm design and data structures in C++ as a practical supervisor. Conducted practical examinations, and marked and provided weekly feedback for assignments.
Software Engineering Intern
Defence Science and Technology Group, Adelaide, Australia, 2015 - 2016
Undertook an exploratory research task, investigating an emerging networking technology.
- Researched the architecture, underwent literature review of related publications and research
- Extended a network emulator to support the network protocol using libraries provided by the technology developers
- Performed high level network analysis to better understand the protocols, and captured examples of data-flows under various scenarios
- Created an application using the technology as an investigation into potentially weaker areas of the protocol
- Co-authored a paper on the research