Brett Ward Limited


BRETT WARD LIMITED
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Tim Ward

Contract Software Engineer

Available:  please email tim@brettward.co.uk or call 07801 703 600 for availability
Location:

Cambridge, England

Contact:

07801 703 600

I will work for clients based anywhere in the world, as long as most of the work can be done in Cambridge. I will not stay away from home for long periods or commute long distances on a daily basis.
Tim

Recent projects Skills Education

If you're reading a paper copy of this CV please note that it is always up to date online at http://www.brettward.co.uk.

Curriculum Vitae

Name Timothy Derek WARD
Address 12 Harding Way, Cambridge, CB4 3RR
Telephone 01223 316389 (home; answering machine)
07801 703600 (mobile; working hours)
Email tim@brettward.co.uk
WWW http://www.brettward.co.uk
Date of birth 28.2.1955
Status Married, three children
Personal skills Driving licence, groups A, D, E
Private pilot's licence
Competent touch typist
Poor French, minimal Czech
Education
1966-73 Bristol Cathedral School
8 O levels from English Literature 50% to Maths 94%
A level Maths, Physics, Chemistry, all grade A
1973-77 Churchill College, Cambridge
1974Maths Tripos IA class 2
1975Maths Tripos IB class 2
1976Computer Science Tripos class 1
1976-77 I spent 1976-77 as a research student at Cambridge, investigating distributed operating systems.
Professional qualifications MBCS (Member of the British Computer Society)
CEng (Chartered Engineer)
Qualified Internal Quality Auditor
Other activities Member of Cambridge City Council
Voluntary work as UN Election Supervisor in Kosovo

Business and technical skills

Please don't be put off by all the management experience, if what you're looking for is a software engineer. I have spent most of the last few years in purely technical roles.
Man management Recruitment, staff appraisal, training and career development.
Project management An excellent record of on time, within budget delivery. Project planning, reporting and control; resource planning, allocation and control; technical supervision and training of project staff.
Commercial Proposal preparation, requirements analysis and specification writing, contract negotiation. Supplier selection and management.
Quality management Implementing and operating BS5750/ISO9000 quality systems, with the necessary emphasis on the people side: educating, motivating and training management and staff.
Communication Used to communicating verbally and in writing at all levels; excellent technical documentation in particular.
Product design Experienced in all phases of product and system development from project inception to post-installation support involving a wide range of computer systems, programming languages and application areas, including C and assembler on most major platforms. Particularly strong in user interface design, using GUIs, character interfaces and other approaches.
Technical experienceMachines

Experience of many machines of all types from embedded microprocessors to mainframes. Recent work has concentrated on PCs using various versions of Microsoft Windows, mostly NT recently.

Languages and systems

Experience of many assemblers, most 3GLs, several 4GLs and various "visual" programming systems. Recent hands-on experience includes amongst other things:

  • Embedded development in C
  • MS Windows development using C++
  • MS Access including Access Basic
  • Sybase development on Sun hardware, and SQL Server on NT

Applications

Experience of many application areas in many industries, mostly technical computing of some kind but also some traditional commercial DP. See employment history for some individual projects.

Hardware

Hardware literate: reasonable understanding of digital electronics; able to use test equipment to debug hardware and software; able to contribute to cost-effective product and system design, and manage hardware design and manufacture projects.

Employment history

1996-Brett Ward Limited, Cambridge (own company)

Contract software engineer. Details of clients and projects given below, to the extent that these are not confidential.

2002-Mobile phone industry
  • GSM Base Station Tools Design, build, test and maintain a variety of tools to install, configure, test, monitor and control GSM base stations. C++ (MSVC and gcc), Windows, Linux, Java, database (ADO, ODBC, Access, MySQL), XML, various GSM protocols.
2000-2001AspenTech
  • Process plant simulation Extending a process plant training simulation system. C on NT.
1999-2001Microsoft
  • Web browser / mobile phone integration. Integrating three different versions of web browsers onto a total of four different mobile phones. Brett Ward Limited is a Microsoft Mobile Explorer System Integrator. Embedded C on a variety of platforms.
1999Confidential
  • Web site debugging. The client's web site had stopped working following some changes and half the transactions were not being recorded in the database; his usual technical resource was not available. The problem was diagnosed and a workaround implemented within a few hours. Technologies involved: IIS, ASP, HTML, VBScript, Access 2000.
1999Gardasoft
  • Database restructuring. Convert a database from DBF files to Access. Restructure and optimise performance, and add new features. Before: one particular operation took seven days to run. After: two minutes. Access 97, VB.
  • Image processing. Machine vision system for setup of a machine tool. Before: minimum setup time 20 minutes for a skilled operator. After: typical setup time two minutes for an unskilled operator. Visual C++, MFC, VB. Image processing system: WiT.
  • Image processing. Development of machine vision QA system. Visual C++, MFC, VB. Image processing system: WiT.
  • Video processing. Bug fixing and enhancement of a video processing and image processing application. Visual C++, MFC. Image processing system: HIL/HAIL.
1998-9Transaction TV
  • DVB - Digital TV - Turbo Internet - e-commerce. System design, supplier and product evaluation, recruitment etc, to support the development of a large e-commerce system to be delivered by satellite, combined with a digital TV channel and a Turbo Internet service.

    Technologies used include DVB, MPEG-2, SQL Server, Visual C++, TCP/IP.

1997-1998Nokia
  • Visual C++ - Windows NT - SDH communications. Maintenance and continued development of Node Managers using CMISE protocols to manage SDH node equipment.
1996-1997Scientific Generics
  • Sybase / Windows client-server development. Maintenance of parts of a large three-level client-server commercial Sybase application, including production of a new data feed subsystem. Technologies used include Transact-SQL, db-Library, and Unix C programming on Sun hardware, and Windows C programming and Visual Basic at the front end.
  • Microsoft Access Performance Optimisation. Work done to improve the performance of a batch function in an Access database system. A particular operation which started off taking around thirty hours ended up taking less than half an hour.
  • Financial Modelling System. Maintenance of a financial modelling system written in Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel, including development of a subsystem to transfer data between the two applications.
1996Cambridge University Press
  • Multimedia CD-ROM Beta Testing. Beta testing of a multimedia CD-ROM title for an academic publisher.


1993-96Cotag International, Cambridge

Software Manager. Responsible for creating and managing the software development department. Cotag design and manufacture access control systems based on a "hands free" RFID (radio frequency identification) device. Reporting to the Development Director.

Introduction of professional software engineering practices, systems and tools (version control, change database, documentation and coding standards etc) and improved testing and QA procedures, leading to more reliable delivery dates and considerably fewer bugs delivered to customers.

Introduction, management and maintenance of Windows NT / WFWG network to coexist with company's Novell network.

Writing requirements, functional and design specifications.

Retained hands-on experience with various DOS development tools and MS Access, Asymetrix ToolBook, MS Visual C++, using assorted Windows technologies (including WFWG SDK, NetDDE in addition to the more usual interfaces). Kept up to date with Windows technology via MSDN etc.

Projects. New versions of the company's DOS-based access control software, including a new networked multi-user version; an MS Windows based Alarm Graphics package; a completely redesigned MS Windows based replacement for the DOS access control software package (under development).

1993Cyberscience, Hoddesdon

PC Team Leader. Responsible for production of new PC versions of the company's 4GL products.

1992Aprotec International, Peterborough

Development Manager. Responsible for production of a new version of the company's product in the document management market.

1992The Scottish Office. Communications consultancy: investigating and reporting on communications problems on a computer network, including recommendations for improvements.
1991A large Japanese electronics company. Product design consultancy. Responsible for the functional design of the software for a new product for the European market. Liaison with hardware designers.
1980-91OTIB A.T. Cambridge Limited, formerly GST Professional Services Limited

Section Manager, Embedded Systems Section (1988-1990). Responsible for section of up to 10 software engineers: staff selection, appraisal, technical supervision. Consultancy, project management and supervision, technical sales assistance, contract negotiation, proposal preparation, quality assurance.

Standards Librarian (1987-1991). Responsible for coordination of standards preparation and issue; member of Standards and QA committee working towards BS5750 registration. Writing of various standards (since 1980) forming GST's quality manual and project management methodology and motivation of staff to use them.

Projects. Involved at various levels (including design and programming in most cases) in a wide variety of assignments, including (amongst many others):

  • Typografica - project manager: GST Software Products' font generation package for word processors and desktop publishers.
  • Acorn Desktop Publisher - project manager: conversion of a GEM-based desktop publishing package to the Acorn Archimedes GUI environment.
  • Archimedes 1st Word Plus - project manager: conversion of a GEM-based word processor to the Acorn Archimedes GUI environment.
  • Point of sale - project supervisor: maintenance of software running in a point of sale system and associated work with the central mainframe system.
  • Communications system - project supervisor (this role included selling the project, contract negotiation, requirements analysis and specification): associated with the above project, replacing an outdated PDP11 communications system with a higher capacity VAX-based solution..
  • Financial information terminal - project manager (this role included selling the project, contract negotiation): hardware design and implementation, software design and implementation, manufacture.
  • Operating system - designer and team leader: building a single-user multi-tasking operating system for Motorola 68000.
  • Assemblers and linkers - project manager, designer, programmer: production of various assemblers for various machines; maintenance of linkers.
  • CAD system - project manager: make a large CAD system machine-independent and create an IBM mainframe implementation from the original on Prime.
1978-80 HPAC Limited, Oxford

Design and implementation of various compilers, codegenerators and runtime libraries. Contribution to the BSI standardisation effort for RTL/2.

1978MEJ Electronics Limited, Dorking

Design of microprogramming language for AMD 2900. Production of microcode assembler. Production of multitasking system for TMS 9900. Machine control software for 9900. Hardware debugging.

1977-78 CPI Data Peripherals Limited, Stevenage

Design and implementation of cross-assembler. Design and implementation of test software for magnetic tape equipment.

1973-76Various

Various vacation jobs involving programming and digital electronics, mostly word processor development for Data Recall in Dorking.