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Colin Riddell

Senior Software Engineer
FanDuel
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Colin Riddell BSc (Hons)

Software Engineer and Technologist

Highly experienced, disciplined and formally trained (BSc) Software Engineer, Coach, Educator and Speaker with 15+ years experience across a very diverse range of sectors and technological disciplines, demands and scalability concerns.

Bringing an infectious enthusiasm for Software Engineering practices, technologies and tech Product Management to teams. Passionate about best practices and introducing the power of new technologies to colleagues.

Can design systems that are robust and fit for purpose while making the correct technology choices along the way. Can adapt to learning required languages / frameworks and a default «bring the whole team» attitude.

Technologies 💡

Currently proficient with: Java, Spring, Spring Boot, JPA, DataDog, Hibernate, AWS, SQL, React, Redux(toolkit), JS, Node.js, Kubernetes, Linux, Microservices, ReST, SocketIO, RabbitMQ, BASH/zsh, BDD / Cucumber, TDD, Google Cloud, Git, Markdown, GitHub, CI/CD(Travis and Jenkins) and many more

Currently skilling up: Event sourcing, RxJava, RxJS, Kafka, Spark, Helm (k8s), Graal, Scala,, Redux, Serverless, Quarkus, Micronaut, CSS

Have worked with in the past: Python, Flask, C, C++, OpenCL, LLVM, Protobuf, Grafana

Enthusiastic to learn: Elixir, GraalVM, Istio, GraphQL, Swift, TensorFlow, ML, Neural Networks.

Experience 👨🏻‍💻

FanDuel

Senior Software Engineer: April 2021 ➜ Present

FanDuel is online fantasy sports and betting company.

At FanDuel, I work on building systems for the Account auth/signup/login flow which is a T1 critical service.

Technologies: Java, Spring, JavaScript/TypeScript, SNS/SQS, React, SQL, Next.js, Kubernetes, Terraform, DataDog

  • Building + owning login/auth services for 30M users at very demanding throughputs and spikey traffic
  • Enhancing scalability with deep-dive engineering analysis and scalability improvements on memory, compute-density, queue pressure, RDS for DB's with 50M+ rows
  • Using Spring Boot, Guce and many other related libraries running on top of k8s and AWS to build scalable back-end systems.
  • Coaching and training on Spring + Spring boot.
  • Taking part in on-call support as part of "build it, own it" team. Mentoring junior and mid-level engineers.

CodeClan

Senior Software Development Instructor: May 2018 ➜ April 2021

CodeClan is a coding bootcamp that re-skills individuals into Software Engineering roles in Scotland. Acted essentially as "principal" Engineering Instructor responsible for building and delivery of materials, training other instructors, managing the quality of the Software Engineering course. Also a people manager.

Technologies: Java, Spring, JavaScript, Node, React, SQL, Ruby, Python

  • Delivering hands on software development training to a professional standard.
  • Full Line Management and coach of instructor team for Glasgow campus location.
  • Responsible for maintenance and development of teaching materials. In particular Java and Cloud Native technologies.
  • Design and implementation of high-impact training materials for key clients.

Bird.i

Head of Product / Development Manager: Aug 2017 ➜ April 2018

  • Built main portal app' while training junior developers in React.js, Redux, Firebase and BDD + TDD
  • Using Cucumber/gherkin to aid rapid product iteration and ensure delivered quality.
  • Building AWS Elastic Beanstalk micro-services for payment processing with Stripe
  • Finding product/market fit for product verticals + requirements management
  • Building and maintaining company OKRs
  • Leading user-centric product development methodologies

ResDiary

Product Manager: July 2016 ➜ Aug 2017

Technical Product Manager for ResDiary. ResDiary is a SaaS restaurant booking and table management platform.

  • Introduced + nurtured use of new technology such as: React.js, BDD + TDD
  • Implemented team split to work towards self-organising teams.
  • Coaching on User Story Mapping, Design Sprints, Lean (Startup) (Build, Measure, Learn), Success Criteria.
  • Improvements to company culture with knowledge sharing talks, focus on learning and collaboration

Senient Systems

Software Engineer: May 2015 ➜ June 2016

Developing software infrastructure for products at early startup company Senient Systems. The product was a cutting edge server design for higher density cost-effective data centre compute and storage.

  • Built suite of middle-tier infrastructure management and control APIs and tools with Python( Flask, SQLAlchemy), Websockets, Java, ReST, Spring, Apache Kafka, ProtoBuf, PXE-boot, Debian

Codeplay Software

Compiler Software Engineer: May 2008 ­➜ May 2015

Codeplay are a specialist software company who build compiler technologies for all types of systems and platforms.

  • Software Engineer then eventually team Lead on several compiler projects through the planning, design, implementation of software for various architectures and processors, including compiler design, toolchain creation testing systems.
  • Worked with C++, Python, JavaScript. LLVM, OpenCL, Linux, Jenkins, Docker, VisualStudio to build OpenCL and compiler tools for mobile and SoC systems.

Interests ⚡️

Outside of software and technology I like cooking, running, electric vehicles, gaming on PC + tabletop, travel, socialising and entertaining.

Outside of work I also hobby in programming. More recent programming projects:

  • The Coder Career was a community and podcast I helped run for enabling aspiring and current professional Engineers get the most out of their careers. We had a podcast and YouTube channel, as well as ran meetups.
  • Caol An entire back-end-as-a-service system that allows users(developers) to easily push and pull data through a simple client. Written with Java, Spring JavaScript. Also using Kubernetes, Micronaut, Grafana. (🔒ask for repo access)
  • Lights Control A weekend project app for fitbit that controls Hue lighting in the home. For this I modded together my own mini react-like framework as the SDK is very limiting.