About Me


Peter Torr Smith, a laugh on the beach :-)
Data, Databases, SQL, NoSQL
Ruby on Rails, APIs
Agile & PM practices, tooling, delivery
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Atlassian Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket/Pipelines
Bootstrap
Full Stack Web - Tech strategy and architecture
GIT, GitHub, GitLab
Hubspot API Integration
Product Ownership
Sidekiq, Good Job, Delayed Job, Cron, async jobs
Technology Management, Architecture, Strategy
Business and UX Analysis
Business & Finance
Heroku
HTML and CSS
Javascript (Typescript)
React
Data Dog, Sentry, Splunk, Raygun
Node.js, Express
CI/CD, BuildKite, Argo, Gitlab pipelines
Stripe Payments

I've been living in Wellington since 1993 and for much of that time have worked in IT delivery for private-sector, Government and start-up businesses in technical, analytical and team management roles.

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Flux Federation (Powershop)
Senior Rails engineer

From: 2023. To: current.

Electricity and gas billing solutions. Features, enhancements, bug fixes, configuration. API development.

AskYourTeam
Senior Developer Engineer

From: 2022. To: 2023.

Full Stack Ruby on Rails, React and AWS developer. Feature development Back-end logic, data, background async jobs and APIs. Highlights: Organisation People Strucutre/hierarchy, with import and export sync. Automated survey permissions from this org structure. Multi-select demographics (JSONB) system-wide. Background / Async jobs (Delayed Job > Good Job), crons. Hubspot API integrations. Platform upgrades and maintenance. On Call duties and incident management 2nd tier customer and bug support

Culture Amp
Analyst Developer Engineer

From: 2021. To: 2022.

Performance Camp, Team KISS. Ruby on Rails API monolith decoupling. Scalability, Performance and simplicity focus. Microservice / domain grouping. Serverless/Lambda with React (Typescript) RSpec / TDD. Sidekiq / async jobs. AWS. BuildKite. Data Dog. 100% Remote. Good online teamwork, agile. Highlights: Shift all exports async to RDS replica. Find and fix slow performing endpoints. Async and GDPR deletion. Technical debt for UX and performance. Domain Driven Design code rework. Monads. Query Repository pattern. React admin application with serverless backend and integration with Launch Darkly SDK and APIs

Resn Digital
Technical Director - Development, Infrastructure, Integration & Operations

From: 2020. To: 2021.

Technology investigation and solution design, scoping and sizing - pre-sales, pre-development. Development, Cloud Infrastructure & services admin, deployments and operations. Scoping, sizing, infrastructure architecture and implementation for https://goodmeat.co, a Vue, ThreeJS & WebGL digital experience. AWS hosting - S3, EC2, CloudFront, ACM, Lambda, Route53, AWS Organizations, IAM, Docker. Git, BitBucket pipelines for CI/CD, branch/tag/release management. Daily scrums, workflow management and kanban boards. Burn up/down tracking. Remote teams. Systems and Security audit and practices guide.

HireThings.com
Full stack tech lead Ruby on Rails developer, AWS engineer

From: 2019. To: current.

Tech lead, developer, architect, cloud infrastructure engineer for site, platform and mobile upgrade and management.

Ministry of Social Development
Analyst, Project Manager, Agile manager, Mobile and User Experience capability manager

From: 2011. To: 2018.

Business analyst, project manger, programme manager and Web Team manager. UX and mobile capability manager. Agile tools capability manager.

Catalyst IT
Open Source developer, analyst and project manager

From: 2009. To: 2011.

Analyst, developer and project manager for a variety of open-source web based applications. Business analysis, Project & Client Management, UX & IA, Wireframing, PHP, Ruby on Rails.

HireThings.co.nz
Co-founder, developer, General Manager

From: 2006. To: 2009.

Co-founder, developer and CEO for online hire and rental marketplace startup www.hirethings.co.nz (and later www.hirethings.com.au)

Intergen
.Net Developer and Database Administrator

From: 2004. To: 2006.

Developer and DBA for a wide range of windows and web based applications

eCentric
Web Developer, DBA

From: 2000. To: 2002.

Developer for eCargo freight marketplace, including early WAP based mobile web UI Support developer for eCentric government clients. Worked alongside founding TradeMe team and technology. Delphi, .Net, C#, SQL Server, XSLT

Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry - IT
Analyst Developer

From: 1998. To: 2000.

Analyst developer for MAF IT systems. Year 2000 upgrades.

Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry - Operations
National IT Projects manager

From: 1995. To: 1998.

Coordinating IT projects and initiatives across the MAF Quality Management. 6 month role operating and managing MAF's GIS systems and capability.


AWS Certified Developer Associate (DVA-C02) (2023)
AWS, Udemy, ACloudGuru, Self paced

Covered most AWS services and best practices for developers. Cloud compute and serverless stacks AWS EC2, VPC, Security Groups, IAM, Elastic Storage, AMIs Elastic Beanstalk CloudFormation, CI/CD services, AWS CLI, Console, SDKs KMS Encryption, Certificates. Serverless, DynamoDB, Lambda, Cognito. API Gateway. CloudWatch, X-Ray, CloudTrail. AWS Billing and Budgets

Ruby on Rails Professional (2019)
Udemy & DevCamp

As part of updating my Ruby on Rails skills I completed 226 module hands-on course "Dissecting Ruby on Rails 5". The result was this website built from scratch with Rails 5 (now updated to Rails 6), Javascript/JQuery, PostgreSQL, web-sockets, GIT and Heroku for hosting.

EDA Dev Bootcamp (2018)
Enspiral Dev Academy

Completion and graduation of Foundation and Bootcamp intensive mobile web development programme. Javascript backend (node.js) and front-end (React/Redux) focus.

Scaled Agile Framework (2017)
SAFe

Scaled Agile Framework practitioner exam and certification.

MSP - Managing Successful Programs (2015)
Axelos / CCLearning

Foundation and Practitioner/Professional exam and certification

Prince2 (2011)
Axelos / CCLearning

Projects In a Controlled Environment (Prince2) foundation and practitioner/professional exam and certification.

Certified Scrum Master (2010)
Scrum.org

Scrum master training and certification.

Microsoft Certified Professional DBA (2006)
Microsoft

SQL Server certified professional DBA exam and certification.

Post-graduate Diploma, Information Sciences (2001)
Massey University

6 years part-time extramural studies whilst working. Covered Management Information Systems, GIS, Object Oriented development and databases, scaling enterprise applications.

Powerbuilder developer (1999)

Full week of practical training on PowerBuilder development

Bachelor of Commerce (1989)
Auckland University

Management, Marketing, Accounting, Finance, Business Computing, Economics, Statistics, Property.


I've just finished a wonderful year as a senior engineer with AskYourTeam in their Wellington team enhancing their Ruby on Rails and React enterprise survey platform. This is hosted with AWS and fully managed with Cloud Formation templates. I have led several new features including implementing a full organisation hiearchy/structure management facility using and extending the Ancestry gem, and pair-building the automation of user permissions automatically derived from this structure. I have implemented, and migrated, many aspects of the application functionality to asynchronous / background job processing, initially using Delayed Job, but recently we migrated everying over to Good Job. Most recently I have led the design and implementation of a number of integrations with Hubspot using their Private Apps APIs so the sales and customer support team were alway up to date with what our customers (accounts and users) are doing with the platform.

I've also just sat and passed my AWS Certified Cloud Developer Associate exam (DVA-C02), assisted by this Udemy course: Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate 2023 NEW DVA-C02 (), course and study matrials from A Cloud Guru, and plenty of reading and hands on.

Certificate for Completing Udemy Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate 2023 NEW DVA-C02
 course

Prior to AskYourTeam, I was contracting to Culture Amp as a senior engineer for their 'Performance' product. For much of this I was primarily focused on back-end performance and enhancements: APIs, DB query optimization, asynchronous job processing, and code restructuring to support domain isolation, laying the foundations for extracting domains out from the Ruby on Rails monolith.

In late 2020 I had the privilege of doing a short contract with the Resn Digital team as one of their Technical Directors. Here I've helped scope out and investigate technical approaches for a number of digital projects in the pipeline, and to help make the GOOD Meat launch experience a reality :-) (the site experience we made is no longer publically available as it was only for their initial launch)

2019/2020 I did a number of upgrades for HireThings.com / .co.nz / com.au towards a more appropriate style and focus required of a modern useful online service. This included upgrading from Ruby on Rails 2 to 5, re-architecting the application and shifting onto Amazon Web Services, enabling continuous deployments, and giving the service a full mobile-first refresh based on the Bootstrap framework. I've also mentored a couple of younger developers during that journey.

2011 - 2018 I worked with the Ministry of Social Development on IT business projects & programmes for a wide range of business services and applications. These have been mainly web applications and the shift to mobile-first web.

To refresh and modernize my technical skills and prepare for the upgrade work on Hire Things, I did the excellent Enspiral Dev Academy Bootcamp over the last quarter of 2018. Here with a great bunch of students and coaches we were immersed in a world of Javascript, frameworks, modern web app development with React, and team challenges. The EDA Graduation Letter covers it quite well

I then spent several weeks this fantasic and challenging Rails Professional Udemy course. It was very detailed, and the result of my efforts was this website (hosted on Heroku), ptorrsmith.com, built from scratch with Rails 5 (I've since upgraded this to Rails 6.1 and ruby 3.2).

Certificate for Completing Udemy Dissecting Rails 5 Professional course

I enjoy business, technology, governance, finance & economics, food and fermentation, swimming, yoga, art, living in Aro Valley, my friends and family

I love helping others learn new things, as well as digging in and helping make a product, business, team, technology or process work.