Charles Blaxland

I have over 17 years' experience building software and leading development teams. I have practical experience in agile/lean development and coaching, architecture, big data, AWS and devops across a wide range of technologies, languages and industries. I consider myself a "full stack" engineer; I know what it takes to design and build great products, deploy them fast and keep them running.

I've been around long enough to know that great software comes mostly from passionate, creative autonomous and talented teams, not from tools, processes and management. I'm a strong believer in agile and lean methodologies, a keen technologist, and I'm constantly striving to improve my craft.

Some of the accomplishments I'm most proud of include:

- Leading architecture and development for a startup whose product went on to power the online bookings of many airlines around the world. This involved coordinating development and operations across a large, geographically distributed team using agile processes.

- Delivering fully automated AWS infrastructure and zero-downtime, continuous delivery pipelines for a telecommunications company. Inception to production for new apps was measured in days.

- Implementation of a financial risk model running on Hadoop in AWS, speeding up model execution from a (projected) six months for the existing implementation to just 8 hours running across 100 servers.

- Leading the redevelopment of a healthcare product that helped regain online market share, while also pioneering use of agile techniques in a highly regulated environment.

- Climbing "The Nose" route on El Capitan, Yosemite National Park, spending 5 nights on a 1km high cliff face.

- Being actively involved in serving and improving my community through the local Apex club.