Titian sell a sample management solution, called Mosaic, to the pharmaceutical and bioscience industries, featuring customisable ordering and workflow manager, labware management and integration with liquid handling robotic hardware. A rigorous test driven and agile development regime ensures clients get a high quality product to aid their drug discovery research.

Key Skills/Tech. used:

C#/ASP .NET, Oracle, PL/SQL, IIS, Javacript, Agilent VWorks, IDBS ActivityBase API, team leadership.

Responsibilities and Achievements

• Recruit, line manage and mentor team.
• Manage projects, from design to final testing and deployment at client.
• Extend integration with Agilent VWorks and liquid handlers.
• Work on-site at client labs, testing, deploying software and providing user training.

DanceStar (or Everybody Dance as called in US) is a brand new rhythm Dance game, based on the existing SingStar tool chain. It has an incredible short development cycle (~9 months), thus reliant on strong tools support early on, to ensure content can be created on schedule.

Key Skills/Tech. used:

C++, MFC, STL, Boost, Managed C++, C# .NET, MSSQL, SSRS, PHP/Pear, XML/XSLT, OpenMP.

Responsibilities and Achievements

• Recruit, manage and mentor tools team.
• Rapidly develop timeline based content markup application (C# .Net), using an in-house framework, covering entire product lifecycle.
• Create new exporter library: data driven, to prepare dance markup for PS3 client from input project files of above application.
• Refactor existing C++ DLL’s with Managed C++ wrappers for re-use in C#.
• Implement video pipeline, from encoding, through to export for BluRay or online download.
• Create reports (using SSRS) to track workflow and highlight outstanding issues to producers.

SingStar is a highly successful social singing game for the Playstation 2 and 3, with a demanding release schedule and heavily localised, totalling over 200 disc titles in 7 years. The PS3 version introduced an online community and store containing songs for download, rapidly approaching 3000 purchasable products.

Key Skills/Tech. used:

C++, MFC, STL, Boost, MSSQL, SSRS, PHP/Pear, Perl, XML/XSLT, OpenMP, SQL Replication, HTML/CSS, i18n.

Responsibilities and Achievements

• Analysing team work-flow and requirements to design optimal tool interfaces for metadata entry and content creation.
• Setup, design and maintain SQL Server database as core data storage for game metadata, assets and version information; with most business logic implemented/enforced within the DB.
• Build content management application for all songs and discs, using C++/MFC/ActiveX. Version controls all metadata and audio/video assets. Full Internationalisation. Tracks workflow, content testing cycle and approval requests. Provides preliminary data validation and sanity checking.
• Work with game engine and server side programmers to formulate specification of game data, then implement modularised exporters to produce data. Primarily database to XML serialisation, transliteration and audio/video encoding. Parallel processing techniques are extensively used to optimise. XSLT is often used to retarget existing exporters to new servers/platforms.
• Implemented SQL replication to facilitate outsourcing of content creation tool chain to another studio.
• Use SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to provide stats and summaries on the entire song/disc database, to highlight currently outstanding work and data-mine back catalogue, e.g. edge case songs for testing game client.
• Implement Apache/PHP/Pear mini Intranet site to manage song evaluation process, prior to songs entering full development. With data flowing from Excel sheets, being evaluated, then migrated to main database.
• Manage the tools team; schedule and delegate work, recruit, appraise, review, and mentor subordinates.

The Getaway is a brutal, cinematic game, set within the seedy underground of the London gangster scene. It is renowned for having an accurate model of London running on a Playstation 2. I was one of the tools programmers on the first Getaway and the sequel Black Monday.

Key Skills/Tech. used:

C++, MFC, STL, MSSQL, Alias Maya API and Mel Script, OpenGL, Perl.

Responsibilities and Achievements

• Write new Alias Maya plugins to provide custom nodes for artists to work with. Often requiring OpenGL rendered geometry.
• Maintain custom asset management system, for splitting city into grid of Maya workspaces for ease of working.
• Implement new multi-layered animation tool chain for Getaway 2. Covering database driven version control system, from which animation data can be saved/loaded to/from Alias Maya and MotionBuilder through custom plugins. Write exporter, to output and compress entire animation database for use in game.
• Create numerous scripts and tools that batch processed the entire city to correct bugs (e.g. non planar portals), swap object references (to help rendering load) etc.

I have a keen interest in Hi-Fi and Home Cinema, which I have drawn upon through two websites I run. Hi-Fi Hunter is new venture, focusing on finding second hand Hi-Fi. It aggregates content from classifieds sites, forums, eBay and a Google CSE covering dealer websites and presents them as a single search engine that sorts results based upon best match.
Utilising technology like WordPress, RSS, Yahoo Pipes, YQL, page scraping, the eBay API and Google CSE. Bringing these together within WordPress’s PHP framework and memory limits was challenging, but rewarding. Previous database optimisation skills helped immeasurably.

The Royd Audio speaker company was a one man effort, in business from the ’80s to 2002. I launched this site to provide a useful resource to others looking for information. In the process, I’ve learnt a lot about WordPress, website admin, SEO and affiliate web marketing.