Curriculum Vitae

I am currently working on contracts with Esat and working on several opensource projects, including bug fixes and improvements for Perl, automated testing software, template software. You can find some of my opensource software at http://search.cpan.org/author/FDALY/

I spent 1 year traveling in Asia, mainly in Thailand and China. I spent 3 months teaching English in China. During this year I made an effort to learn the local languages and can now speak, read and write Thai at a basic level and Mandarin Chinese at an intermediate level. While living in China I worked on some programming projects that I will soon be releasing as open source.

Positions held: Portal Development Manager (Mar 2001), Broadband Research Manager (Dec 2000), UNIX Team Leader (Sep 2000), UNIX Developer/Sysadmin (Sep 1998)

In Mar 2001 I was appointed Portal Applications Manager for Esat Fusion. With my team, I was responsible for providing new functionality on our portal websites either through 3rd party applications or in house development. In my time in that position we deployed the Obtree Content Management system and launched several services including Google integration, detailed sports news and results for Ireland and UK, a web to SMS gateway, and a voice command driven email to phone service. We also unified the varied registration systems of our portals into a highly flexible modular registration system.

In these roles I developed software for customer use, for technical team use and for use by internal business users.

• I wrote patches for our UNIX daemons to use an SQL database instead of /etc/passwd, allowing us to cope with our rapidly expanding user base.
• I wrote reporting tools and sysadmin automation tools.
• I created a GUI for our customer care trouble ticket system.
• Esat also launched the first independent voice service in Ireland and I wrote a call rating engine to calculate and analyse customer savings versus our competitors. This was based on several million call records and the results were used in several major advertising campaigns.
• I created a framework for allowing Perl objects to be used transparently across a network.
• I designed a system to allow customers to view their bills online. My system was selected by management over externally provided solutions due to it's much lower initial costs and maintenance costs and increased functionality for customers.
• I integrated google.com's search engine into our portal site. This involves communicating with Google's servers via XML over HTTP and displaying the resulting data in a web browser. Non-technical designers had full control over the look and feel and could alter it with standard web design tools (Dreamweaver etc.)
• While working on the above I developed and documented many libraries and modules which were reused in my projects and also by colleagues.

I also played an active part in helping the business users formulate and express their requirements to our group IT dept, in defining and refining business processes, analysing data structures and automation of work flow and in testing the results.

When I started working in Esat I was part of a two man team that set up a full Linux based ISP from scratch and linked it into the internal sales system. Esat Clear (now EsatBT) is now the largest ISP in Ireland.

Position: Research Demonstrator.

I taught mathematics to university students in tutorials and corrected assignments.

Position: Contractor.

I was contracted to design and code a client and server for NightFreight Ireland - a freight company with depots all around Ireland. This software is the backbone of their network, handling all their consignments and invoicing. The client runs on Windows or UNIX and has a full GUI. Between client and server it comprises over 25,000 lines of object oriented Perl code.

Initially I did part time telephone tech support, then moved on to systems administration and design and development of internal systems for automated sales and administration.