About Me

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, product and team management and delivery roles.

I now spend time between Wellington and Auckland, and have been enjoying remote working and the challenges and opportunities that presents.

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.

Work History and roles Qualifications Download/View Profile/CV PDF

JAVLN - Insurance

Currently I'm the technical team lead at JAVLN for a team of engineers + QA, channeling both new features and support issues from Product and Support, triaging and prioritising these, and working with the team to deliver these in a timely manner.

I coordinate sprints for features and improvements, P1 and P2 issue diagnosis and resolution, and scheduled, automated and manual releases throut UAT and production.

Some highlights from JAVLN:

• Improving the work flow from identification, diagnosis, fix, testing and release
• Improving the quality and clarity of work items and acceptance criteria, and the quality and throughput of the work delivered
• Implementing Open Telemetry (OTEL LGTM stack) for tracing and metrics (to Cloudwatch and Grafana)
• Several rounds of performance improvements and optimisations, including database query optimisation (N+1s mostly), caching, and code refactoring

Flux Federation (Meridian) - Electricity and Gas

2023 - 2025 I completed a 19 month contract working fully remote as a Senior Product Engineer for Flux Federation working on their enterprise electricity and gas billing platform.

Much of my work there involved designing and implementing new APIs (using Open API) for external and internal consumption. This was to progress the platform to support new Open Data regulations in the Australian market (coming to NZ soon), and to start extracting services out from the core Ruby on Rails monolith.

Some highlights from Flux Federation:

• Supporting the product owners and manager to refine, design and deliver new capabilities
• Implementing new features and enhancements to the core customer billing platform
• Analysis, design and implementation and enhancement of new and existing APIs
• Core APIs to support new microservices
• Core APIs to comply with Consumer Open Data regulations
• API extensions for the mobile app
• Working closely with external teams and stakeholders to support their adoption of these new APIs
• Using OpenAPI to define the APIs, code generation from this to create common reusable classes for the development teams
• Performance optimizations of core code and background jobs
• System financial data audits, integrity checks and fixes

AskYourTeam - Enterprise Survey Platform

2022 - 2023 I had a wonderful year as a senior engineer with AskYourTeam in their Wellington team enhancing their Ruby on Rails and React enterprise survey platform. I led several new features including implementing a full organisation hiearchy/structure management facility using and extending the Ancestry gem, and automating of user permissions automatically derived from this structure. I also migrated many aspects of the application functionality to asynchronous / background job processing, initially using Delayed Job, but then using Good Job. I also 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.

In 2023 I 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 (Udemy certificate), course and study matrials from A Cloud Guru, and plenty of reading and hands on.

Culture Amp - Employee Experience Platform

2021 - 2022, I contracted fully remote 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.

RESN - Digital Agency

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)

HireThings - Online Hire and Rental Marketplace

2019 - 2020 I did a number of major 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 (since upgraded to 7.2), 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.

Modern Web and Rails Upskilling

In late 2018, to refresh and modernize my technical skills and prepare for the upgrade work on Hire Things, I did the excellent Enspiral Dev Academy Bootcamp. 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 completing this fantasic and challenging Rails Professional Udemy course. It was very detailed, a great refresher, 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).

Ministry of Social Development - Government

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.

Prior RelevantExperience

Prior to my time at the Ministry of Social Development, I gained experience in various roles that helped shape my skills in technology and business.

• 2009-2011: Catalyst IT - Helping win and implement a wide range of projects - pre-sales, analysis and requirements workshops, design, development, implementation and support
• 2006-2009: Starting and embedding Hire Things in NZ and Australia.
• 2000-2006: eCentric and Intergen - .Net development and DBA
• 1994-2000: Ministry of Agrculture (MAF) - Business IT Coordinator, Business Analyst, Developer/DBA