Stephen Souness

Current

• Senior Java Developer at Portaltech

Past

• Java / Groovy Developer at Signature Technologies
• Software Engineer at Alchemy Group Limited
• Office Clerk at New Zealand Post

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Education

• University of Canterbury
• University of Canterbury

Recommended

3 people have recommended Stephen

Connections

63 connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

• My Blog

Stephen Souness’s Summary

Professional Experience:
- Technical lead in Java E-commerce project.

- E-Commerce for B2C retail.

- Experience with the Atlassian suite of tools, including Jira, Confluence, Bamboo, Crucible.

- Developing on the Hybris e-commerce platform.

- Integration with payment gateway webservice (Commidea) using Spring for resource pooling.

- Groovy developer on a greenfield Grails 1.1 - 1.1.1 application interacting with Spring web services, Hibernate, MySQL

- Software developer developing web-based applications with AJAX, Tomcat 6, JSF (RichFaces), JPA (Eclipselink), Java 6 and MS SQL Server as part of an agile team of 8 developers and a business analyst

- Project manager using Struts, JPox (now known as DataNucleus), JTDS JDBC, SQL Server, Tomcat 5.5 and Java 5 to deliver solutions as the lead developer

- Liaising directly with clients from successfull RFPs responses, to requirements analysis, design, development and testing

- Software developer converting "classic ASP" based websites with scalability issues into JSP-based websites backed by elegant data repositories with timeout based caching. Included MS SQL Server stored procedures, custom tag libraries and load testing

- Systems support for in-house software developers. Set up Linux and Windows servers and workstations for developing and hosting websites, under Apache, IIS 4 - 5, Tomcat 5 - 6.

- Java developer Swing GUIs in Java 1.2 and 1.4 - developing rich user interfaces from mockups for the client side of a trust accounting system and a tourism reservation system

Goals:
- Improving development and deployment processes.

- Mentoring of junior developers, project development team leading.

Stephen Souness’s Specialties:

Java, JEE, J2EE, Spring, unit testing, Grails, Groovy, Spring MVC, Spring Web Flow, JPA, JDO, JSF, Struts, Hybris, JSP, JSTL, Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, JDBC, Java Servlets, Swing, custom tag libraries, Software Architecture, Software Engineering, Domain Driven Design, OOP, OOA, OOD, AOP, UML, Design Patterns, Refactoring, Agile Development, XP, Spring, Eclipse, CVS, Ant, Hudson, JUnit, XML, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Plone, Zope, Web 2.0, Perl

Stephen Souness’s Experience

• Senior Java Developer

  Portaltech

  (Privately Held; Information Technology and Services industry)

  July 2009 — Present (9 months)

• Java / Groovy Developer

  Signature Technologies

  (Computer Software industry)

  March 2009 — June 2009 (4 months)

  Initially employed as a Java developer.
  
  I took on the responsibility of maintaining an application developed using Grails 1.1, backed by a MySQL 5.1 database.
  
  Other valuable technical experience gained from this role:
  - Commercial exposure to Spring (2.5) and Hibernate
  - UK experience
  - A greater appreciation of the importance of agile methodologies

• Software Engineer

  Alchemy Group Limited

  (Computer Software industry)

  1999 — 2008 (9 years )

  For the last 6 years I worked as a Java developer - most recently in agile teams - producing highly scalable, multi-user applications backed by JEE and J2EE servers.
  
  Some of the technologies involved included: JSF, Struts, Tiles, JPA, JDO, JSTL, JSP, XML, SQL, custom tag libraries, Javascript, HTML, Linux, JDBC, PostGIS, SQL Server, MySQL.
  
  I started off as a graduate developer using Perl, HTML, JavaScript and SQL to produce dynamic websites with ASP pages and CGI scripts.
  
  As technologies changed, I moved on to work with Java 1.2 and its Swing GUI components.

• Office Clerk

  New Zealand Post

  (Government Agency; Package/Freight Delivery industry)

  January 1996 — February 1996 (2 months)

  Continuing conversion of the head office filing system from ring binders to Codafile, and updating an Access Database recording the volume location of information.

Stephen Souness’s Education

• University of Canterbury

  Partial PGDipSci , Computer Science , 2000 — 2002

  I studied part-time towards a Post-graduate diploma in Science, but had to give up studying as work commitments became more important.
  
  Courses included the following major topics:
  - Compression
  - assignment involved evaluating different heuristics for compressing monochrome bitmaps
  - Special topic: Simulation:
  - assignment involved simulating a boat yard operation using DESMO-J (Java)
  - Simulation analysis and design:
  - assignment involved use of Akaroa2 for discrete event simulation (C++)
  - Distributed information systems
  - assignment involved using CORBA to implement an adventure game
  - Advanced topics in distributed systems
  - project involved applying EJB 2.0 entity beans using JBoss with Tomcat and PostgreSQL, demonstrating the application of design patterns

• University of Canterbury

  BComm , Computer Science, "Accountancy Finance and Information Systems" , 1995 — 1998

  NB: The AFIS major did not include any accountancy or finance papers.
  
  Courses covered:
  - Relational databases (SQL)
  - Networking - overview of protocols, layers, packet analysis
  - Software Engineering
  - Programming in C
  - The use of various command-line utilities and shell scripts in Solaris
  - Basic administration in Windows NT Server 4
  - Processes and threads (producer-consumer problems, deadlocks...)
  - Management science (aka Operations Research) - systems and decision making, statistical analysis of trends
  - Simulation using Simula and DEMOS
  - Pseudo-random number generators

Additional Information

Stephen Souness’s Websites:

• My Blog

Stephen Souness’s Interests:

trends in technology, killer apps, music, Irish history, Rugby, teaching myself to play bass,

Stephen Souness’s Groups:

•    Eclipse
•    Agile Alliance
•    Grails User Group
•    Postgres
•    Spring Users
•    Linux Users
•    Spring User Group UK
•    University of Canterbury Alumni Association
•    Hibernate Users
•    JavaFX
•    Design & DDD UK User Group
•    Java & JEE UK
•    Tomcat Users
•    hybris://QuickLive Customers and Partners

Stephen Souness’s Honors:

Airways Corporation's Collaborative Arrivals Manager system won 2 Computerworld Excellence Awards in 2008

Alchemy Group Limited were 3rd on the Deloittes/Unlimited Fast 50 list of New Zealand's fastest growing companies

Stephen Souness’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• consulting offers
• expertise requests
• reference requests
• getting back in touch