Greetings from Edinburgh!
I currently work for a small company whose investors have cut their funding (Brexit?), and so have had to make most of their software team redundant - including me. So, I’m looking for new opportunities.
I’m a senior software engineer with over twenty years professional experience. I hope that done right, the co-op sector can be a less destructive alternative to standard corporate start-up culture, both to their members and the wider world in general.
This is why I’d like to get involved with a worker co-op directly to learn more about the practicalities - and not least to feel like I’m working on something I am mutually invested in. I’ve actually been looking for co-op opportunities and co-operators for some time, but they seem hard to find. Therefore, any leads welcomed!
My background: most recently I’ve been working for a telecommunications infrastructure company, developing an application for managing the company’s specialised remote off-grid generators for powering radio masts. This is written in a mixture of Java, Groovy, C, and Javascript. I re-engineered incremetally from a single-user SWT desktop application into a multi-user web based application using Ratpack, whilst keeping it working during this process. I developed the initial web UI using AngularJS and custom D3 charts; later I assisted new team members to replace this with their tool of choice, React. Previously I had designed the build and deployment system in Jenkins, Ansible, and a mixture of Gradle (for Java) and Make (for C), with installers for CentOS, Debian and Windows. Version control is with Git. Other systems I worked were a stock-control application using CouchDB/AngularJS, and components of an embedded linux controller in C and C++, shell scripting, awk/sed, including a web UI using AngularJS/D3.
In previous professional experience, applications I’ve built or maintained include 3D graphics / simulation in C/C++, a property management website in Perl/Javascript, and a Puppet/Git based deployment system thereof, workflow-based office automation in C#/.Net, and others. I’ve published a few open source libraries in Perl and Javascript. I’ve worked for small one-man start-up companies and large ones like Sun, and both as an employee and freelancer, and a volunteer for charities or communities.
Prior to that, I studied physics and computing, and I was a postgraduate student at CERN studying architectures for the ATLAS detector’s second level trigger, using discrete event simulation software and benchmarking pattern recognition algorithms in C/Assembly for DSP microcontrollers.
Outside work, I’m currently the primary member of a volunteer team maintaining http://social.coop’s infrastructure (my username there is @wu-lee), an experiment in member-owned democratically run social media. This uses a Mastodon server running in Docker on a Linux server, and Loomio for decision making. This has been an invaluable experience in community building and direct democracy, with both positive and negative lessons.
In 2009 I helped found Edinburgh Hacklab, a successful member owned and run community workshop, of which I am still a member.
CV available on request, and my current employers are happy to provide a reference.
) thank me for that!