Piers MacDonald's Email Addresses & Phone Numbers

📖 Summary

I am a software developer with over 8 years of professional experience. I've mostly been paid to write C# & Java web applications, web services and backend applications. In my spare time I tinker around on the front end more with HTML5 and mobile client based projects.Software Development Engineer @ The Coalition (Microsoft Studios) Our services team develops highly available, responsive RESTful web services in partnership with game client teams to give players critically acclaimed single player and multiplayer gaming experiences. Examples of completed services include a player profile service to allow for service-based appearance/settings storage, progression calculation etc for shipped title Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. Delivered using Web API, Azure Table Storage etc. Working on services for upcoming title Gears 4. Includes using web sockets, Orleans actor based web framework and Azure event hubs to create real-time, asynchronous services capable of delivering exciting new multiplayer experiences for a beloved franchise. From June 2014 to Present (1 year 7 months) Vancouver, Canada AreaSenior Software Engineer / Release Engineer @ Software development: Develop and maintain backend services for some of our most critical product features. These are multi-tenant, high-volume services including ones for push notifications (GCM, APNS etc) and image management (uploading, resizing, deleting, thumbnailing, archiving etc). These include RESTful web services and windows services. Release engineering: Introduced build and deploy automation for consistent, recoverable deployments through all environments. A combination of CI software, scripting and process has led to a reduction in deployment related customer impact by over 99%. Additionally the increased automation means that while our application count increased 3X our release management overhead has reduced. From July 2012 to June 2014 (2 years) Vancouver, Canada AreaSystem Analyst II @ Developed secure reporting and workflow java web application to facilitate middleware migration of entire television subscriber base. Developed web service wrapper around legacy C screen-scraping mainframe interface. Off-shored development and support of 100 legacy applications. This included training contractors on our internal java framework and mainframe interfaces as well as documentation. From January 2010 to July 2012 (2 years 7 months) Developer Analyst @ Performed end-to-end rapid application development. Sourced projects by canvassing the enterprise for technology gaps (e.g. automation needs, data aggregation feeds to prevent system context switching etc), worked with users to design a solution, developed application (e.g. web app, services etc) and supported it. Developed web applications using either java Struts framework or C# web forms with Oracle data bases. Services and batch jobs were all C# console applications. Learned basics of schema design, MVC application development and SDLC. Developer supported applications taught junior developers the importance of writing maintainable and extensible code. Applications were typically focused on short-term gain when a traditional road-mapped IT solution was years down the pipe. For example during a consumer broadband upgrade a communication gap let me write a scheduled batch job, in about 2 weeks, which reconciled inventory between two systems saving over $3,000,000 in extraneous hardware purchases. This instilled importance writing software for a purpose and continuing as there are always more problems to solve. From June 2007 to December 2009 (2 years 7 months) BSc, Computer Science @ University of Victoria From 2001 to 2006