Ian Homer

Engineer, Tech Lead & Coach

  • Full stack software engineering
  • CI/CD & test automation
  • TypeScript, Node.js, React + Native
  • Continuous & collaborative learning
  • Cloud engineering
  • Tech leadership
  • Technical design
  • Coaching & teaching

Profile

I’m a pragmatic developer and technology leader, with decades of software engineering experience across many disciplines. I'm effective when working collectively to build and deliver systems that are a joy to develop, and make a difference to end users.

You’ll find me trying to improve my practices with pairing & mobbing ; group learning ; cross-discipline collaboration ; lean manufacturing ; BDD & TDD ; codifying everything ; shifting left ; rapid feedback loops ; slicing work and reducing WIP ; metrics & live dashboards ; CI/CD and shipping software ; making bets ; being T-shaped ; empowering the whole team ; encouraging flow & organisational alignment.

Recent blogs posted on Adaptive Kind.

Experience

2022 - current
Tech Lead, Engineer & Coach

Providing tech lead, platform engineering, software engneering and coaching services.

Platform engineering leadership for an ESG benchmarks provider, helping to enable engineer in the efficient and safe delivery of change - AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Argo CD GitOps, Datadog.

Full stack software engineering adding end user collaboration features for a provider of retail digital twins - React, Python, GCP.

2018 - 2022
Tech Lead
WORTH

Empowered and guided teams delivering gov.uk and enterprise services across a variety of tech - Azure, AWS and GCP, with Node.js, C# & .NET, Java, React, React Native (Android & iOS app development), Serverless & Docker/k8s.

Advocated pair and mob programming to encourage sustainable development activities and diversity in the teams.

Hands-on with all aspects of engineering - front end, back end, cloud, CI/CD and QA. Bridging engineering communities with stakeholders and enterprise controls, especially with regards to architecture and security.

Responsibile for delivering huge impact to our customers, including multiple gov.uk services, health app for insurance organisation, and assessment services for a UK education body.

Coached the team in TDD and continuous delivery practices. In all projects I remained hands-on to maintain a close knowledge of the code, to be able to teach by showing ; to be able to assist with any aspect of coding, troubleshooting and operational support.

2018 - 2018
Senior Java Engineer
Sedex

Development of an ethical supply management system with AngularJS, Java, Neo4j, Docker, Kubernetes deployed into AWS. I was responsible for ensuring that development adhered to quality metrics. My focus was on efficient ways of working and delivering against product goals.

2016 - 2018
Adviser
Citizen's Advice

Volunteer face-to-face and phone line adviser helping local individuals with challenging situations by providing practical guidance and support.

2013 - 2016
Principal Engineer
SDL

Enhanced the mobile web delivery aspects of the SDL Tridion CMS using Spring, Hibernate, REST APIs & .NET extensions.

Created an identity and access management / SSO solution using Spring Boot, SAML, OAuth, OData and PingFederate. Continuous deployments into AWS driven by Jenkins. Using BDD approach with Cucumber to assert functionality against acceptance criteria.

2007 - 2013
Co-founder & CTO
bemoko

We created a web delivery process for digital agencies that quickly delivered high quality, beautiful UX & highly interactive mobile web sites. This in turn led to a profitable business and IP that attracted SDL to bemoko.

Delivered mobile web optimised sites that powered Pizza Hut mobile ordering, Macmillan Cancer Support mobile version of public web site and many marketing campaigns for brands such as JCPenny, Bacardi & Walmart.

Developed a mobile web platform built with Java, Spring, Groovy, Freemarker and JavaScript, allowing web developers to rapidly create web sites with optimised multi-channel UX, specialising on mobile.

TDD with JUnit, Maven, Jenkins.

2006 - 2007
Senior Architect
Volantis Systems

Senior architect responsible for the creation of mobile media delivery platforms for VimpleCom (Moscow) and for MTN (Johannesburg). Created directives, guiding principles and best practices to empower and enthuse the team of around 20 technical consultants and architects.

2001 - 2006
Senior Technical Consultant
Volantis Systems

Lead consultant for mobile web systems for 3 (Reading), AT&T Wireless (Seattle), Orange (Paris), Telecom Italia Mobile (Rome), Telefonica (Madrid), Turkcell (Istanbul) and WWE. On-site integration of the Volantis mobile solution and Java development work.

2000 - 2001
Head of Engineering
Xtranet
1999 - 2000
Technical Team Lead
RTSe
1996 - 1999
Software Engineer
Xtranet

Tech Space

Continuously evolving, but interests of note include ...

TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, Next.js, React, React Native, D3, Tailwind, Python, Java, Spring, Hibernate, Azure, AWS, Google Gloud, GitHub Actions, Azure Devops, Terraform, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Serverless Framework, Azure Functions, AWS Lambda, MySQL, SQL Server, CosmosDB, Git, Jest, Mocha, Cucumber, Playwright, Cypress, BrowserStack, Appium, SonarQube.

Contact

Please get in touch if you would like to find out more.