I'm a developer at ThoughtWorks, and a former student of Manchester Metropolitan University, graduating with a first class honours in Computer Science.
To summarise myself in a single word, that word is lucky. I'm lucky enough to be around at a time when technology is changing the world, and I'm lucky enough to have had the means and the opportunity to do what I love for the past ten years, and even get paid for it!
Developer @ Whilst at ThoughtWorks I've had the opportunity to work on many exciting projects. My client work has included working on big data platforms and the UK government's digital transformation. Besides this, I've also had the opportunity to work on causes relating to security and privacy.
My current project is working to build a big data platform on top of Amazon Web Services. We're building a data warehouse, collecting massive amounts of data from all across the client's business. We're then allowing people to work with this data, manipulate it, and share their results with others. They intend to use it to develop new products, improve existing ones, and gain insight which will drive the future of their business. The platform is powered by a mixture of Hadoop, Apache Mesos, and Apache Spark, sitting on top of Amazon S3, Elastic MapReduce (EMR) and Data Pipeline.
In the first half of 2015, I worked with The Insolvency Service to develop their Redundancy Payments application. The project was one of a handful of exemplars, run as part of the UK Government's digital transformation, led by GDS. Working as a team of ThoughtWorkers and Insolvency Service staff, we started with a fourteen page paper form. Our task was to develop a digital replacement, putting users first. We dramatically simplified the form, driving out our needs from extensive user research. GDS featured our work in their blog. From July 2014 to Present (1 year 6 months) London, United KingdomJunior Windows Developer @ Originally planned as a 36 week work placement, the 14 month placement meant actively working on several large-scale projects as well as attending to hundreds of support requests. Most of the job was maintaining the company’s real-time insurance quotation engine; written entirely in C++ with heavy reliance on Boost. Due to the large number of products under the team’s remit, work was also done in C#, C and Python.
The largest solo development project was a pair of applications: a desktop application (written in C#/XAML using WPF) for the insurance algorithm developers to interact and manage clients using a particular product remotely, as well as a web dashboard (written in a mixture of ASP.NET, C#, HTML, CSS and JavaScript) which acted a controller for the desktop application.
The placement also included DSDM training from Radtac, but the team mainly focused on combining development and support work through the use of Kanban. Other work included setting up the team’s continuous integration system using CruiseControl.NET, and then later migrating to Jenkins-CI. To accompany the move, work was done over several months to increase unit testing coverage and begin adopting test-driven development. From June 2012 to August 2013 (1 year 3 months) Stockport, United KingdomOffice Administrator @ A summer job which then extended until March the following year. Day-to-day activities included speaking with customers, both in-person and on the phone; organising multiple simultaneous local, regional and international deliveries, including contracts for the MoD, managing production on the factory floor as well as various administration jobs. The specialist, bespoke nature of the products combined with the small size of the company means that work is time critical and employees are required to have good organisational skills and be capable of working under pressure. From March 2011 to March 2012 (1 year 1 month) Co-Owner & Co-Founder @ Internet radio aimed at people playing online games. Founded in 2008, it included the 24/7 streaming of music over an Icecast server combined with a complete custom website solution written in PHP using MySQL. Technical work included developing a brand, website and various tools so people could listen as well as interact with the people live on-air. Aside from that, most of the work was in developing relationships with gaming communities as well as the day-to-day management of the radio itself.
The radio grew to approximately 400-500 concurrent listeners and just over 10,000 active forum users, maintained by up to 30 volunteer staff before being sold in 2010. From August 2008 to December 2010 (2 years 5 months)
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science, First Class Honours @ The Manchester Metropolitan University From 2010 to 2014 Jimmy Thompson is skilled in: C#, Java, HTML, PHP, Scrum, Software Development, Agile Methodologies, C++, CSS, Python, Visual Studio, SQL, jQuery, Kanban, MySQL
Websites:
http://www.jimmythompson.co.uk