Mark Brown

Melbourne, Australia

Summary

I work on the Web Platform, building rich web applications and mobile apps with JavaScript. I enjoy teaching others and working collaboratively with talented people. Having worked with many small to medium sized teams over the years I'm comfortable working across the full stack of multiple platforms(Rails, NodeJS, Django, .NET MVC, PHP and Java). My areas of expertise are front-end engineering, Ruby on Rails and NodeJS.

For three years I've worked with the incredibly talented team at Ferocia building the digital bank Up. Leading the development of the integration with TransferWise for International Payments, Pay Splitting and BPAY are personal highlights.

I was based in London for two years and worked with the agile consultancy Equal Experts. There I helped the John Lewis team develop a component library and design system in React. With O2 Priority I helped build a high performance Node app that scaled up to support 20k concurrent users as well as optimising the mobile-web experience. I helped build an analytics platform for Informa clients to explore and visualise agricultural data. Another interesting piece of work I picked up was developing a tool for tagging and annotating traffic images for lvl5 for application in self-driving cars.

In Melbourne, Australia I worked for Inspire9 Development, a development agency that worked with early-stage startups and helped them develop Tribes - an app for managing co-working spaces. I also worked with Adioso for two years and PageUp People for four years - the leading Australian talent management software provider. I have now been working on the web professionally for over 16 years.

I'm also an author of Sitepoint's JavaScript channel.

I build working software with readable code that's well tested.

Personal Attributes

Technical skills

High level of competency and experience in:

Education

2004 – 2007 Swinburne University, Hawthorn
Bachelor of Multimedia - Multimedia Software Development
Achieved a distinction average
1998 – 2003 VCE, Billanook College, Mooroolbark
Maths Methods / Physics / English / Media Studies / VET Multimedia / Information Processing and Management
Achieved an ENTER of 83.55

Academic awards

2006 Golden Key International Honour Society Membership
2003 Subject award: Academic excellence – VET Multimedia
2003 Certificate II in Arts (Interactive Multimedia)

Employment History

2018 - now

Senior Software Engineer with Ferocia

Up is a React Native app, with a GraphQL and Rails back-end. I've enjoyed working across the stack, leading development of features like International Payments, Pay Splitting and BPAY payments.

I'm proud of the work I've done to improve accessibility of the app for non sighted customers as well.

Tooling: Ruby on Rails, React Native
2016 - 2018

Front-End Engineer with Equal Experts

The team at John Lewis were busy breaking up a big online store into many, I helped them develop their component library and design system so all teams could build on the same base.

With O2 Priority I built a high performance Node app and CMS in React. I also optimised their mobile experience and built a component library to help keep things maintainable.

For Informa Agribusiness Intelligence I worked on an Aurelia app, adding search & filter capabilities and data visualisations for agricultural insights.

lvl5.ai based in San Francisco asked me to develop an image tagging and annotation tool in React.

I was also involved with interviewing and bringing new engineers into the fold at Equal Experts.

Tooling: NodeJS, AWS, Nginx, MongoDB, React, Vue, ES6, Aurelia, D3, Sass, Mocha, Enzyme & Sinon
2015 - 2016

Front-end developer at Inspire9

Inspire9 development make web apps for startups.

Tribes, Tribes Kiosk, Tribes Bookings, Ritualize, YourGrocer, LaunchVic, and PWC's Open Innovation Platform.

Tooling: Rails, Heroku, AWS, Docker, CoffeeScript / ES6, Cordova, Angular, React, React Native, Mocha & Chai, jQuery
2013 - 2015

Front-end developer at Adioso

Adioso is a flight search engine born and bred in Melbourne, it's the best way to find cheap flights for flexible travellers who don't have fixed dates in mind.

Adioso, Volantio, Fly to your friends

Tooling: Python, Django, Middleman, CoffeeScript, Backbone, jQuery
2013

Web developer at Culture Amp

I built out a self-service platform where clients could configure their accounts for Murmur, an employee engagement surveying tool with analytics.

CultureAmp

Tooling: Rails, MongoDB, AWS, Heroku, CoffeeScript, Backbone, jQuery
2012 - 2013

Front end developer at Inspire9

Building Rails applications with a small super-talented team & learning lots.

Inspire9 Community, Inspire9 Development, Hello Sunday Morning, and Obsurfation.

Tooling: Rails, Sass, Cordova, Backbone
2012 - 2018

Freelance Web developer and author at Yellowshoe

Web applications & games as well as contracting to Melbourne based web development agencies.

Clients include SitePoint, CSIRO, Love and Money, Mr Pony and IE

2007 - 2012

Web developer & designer at PageUp People

Specialised in design and front end development but also developed .NET and Rails applications.

Mentored other developers in front-end development and produced front end standards.

Was the lead designer & developer working on a re-design of the recruitment product for the global market.

Tooling: .NET, C#, Rails, Sass, Prototype / jQuery
2007

Teaching at Swinburne University

Tutored classes of 120-140 students per semester

  • Internet Technologies (Web Standards, Accessibility and Browser Compatibility, HTML / CSS / JavaScript / PHP
  • Web Programming: (PHP and MySQL)

I also developed teaching material for Internet Technologies.
2007

Web developer at Swinburne University

During my final year of study I worked with Andrew Normand and Caroline Rojas in the Web Managers Department at Swinburne. I rewrote the Administration Area (a CMS that enables publishers to update their individual sites) using object oriented PHP & MySQL.

I also made global semantic markup changes to the site including making all navigational menus lists.
2006-2007

Web developer at yellowshoe

My own business mostly in CSS development, I received work from my contributions on the CSS forum at Sitepoint, where I actively participated.
2006

Web developer at Faculty of ICT, Swinburne University

I worked full time during 2006 as a web developer producing content for the site & developing a faculty intranet.

Personal Skills

Working as a tutor and leader in development teams has developed my listening, teaching and leadership skills. I'm creative, a good problem solver and capable of leading technical teams to successful outcomes.

Interests and hobbies

Guitar, singing, gardening, cooking & yoga.