Ben McEvoy

I am a Solutions Developer and Analyst with extensive experience, having successfully designed, developed and delivered many client server and web based applications across a variety of industries. I am proficient in many Microsoft technologies, particularly Microsoft SQL, ASP.NET, .NET and C#.

My focus over the last few years has been on automation of the testing and deployment of solutions, and patterns and practices.

You can contact me via email or linkedin:

http://au.linkedin.com/in/mcevoyben/ 0403 735 700

Holding Redlich | Melbourne, AU

April 2022 - June 2023

Senior Engineer

Holding Redlich is a national law firm of around 500 employees. They have a small application development team that needed help establishing some engineering practices.

During my time I worked closely with the application lead and helped develop new practices in the team, including:

  • configuration of a development virtual machine
  • bringing systems under source control/git
  • introduction of gitflow and branching strategies
  • documentation of processes, project plans and specifications
  • repair and remediation of several systems
  • delivery of several small projects
  • helping to establish agile practices
  • mentoring the team

Australian Unity | Melbourne, AU

August 2021 - November 2021

Senior Developer

Migration of sitecore sites from various versions of Sitecore 6.5-8 to a consolidated Sitecore 9.2 instance.

A number of legacy sites are fronted by an F5 IRules instance. This routes requests to disparate sites while presenting a consistent URL/IAL structure to the user.

As part of the migration I spent some time in refactoring and remediating these TCL rules, to allow easier development, automated testing of the rules, and providing patterns to help organise and identify related groups of rules making decommissioning easier once migration was completed.

Utilised automating spidering and scanning tools to identify performance problems. Demonstrated basic statistical methods to identify performance problems from the raw scanning data, reducing page load times from around 15 seconds to ~300ms.

MLC | Melbourne, AU

April 2021 - June 2021

Senior Developer

Creating new features for the retail insurance portal, which I had worked on some years earlier as a Senior Engineer.

UniSuper | Melbourne, AU

August 2020 - November 2020

Team Lead

Team lead of 5/6 developers. Mainly concerned with ensuring work was sufficiently groomed and ready for implementation.

Developed tools to audit and report on website instances, to help identify components and features to be migrated.

Deloitte Digital | Melbourne, AU

April 2019 - August 2020

Contract Developer

Working with Deloitte on several projects, including a Sitecore 9.3 SXA site for the Australian Energy Market Operator.

During this engagement I completed the integration of OAUTH identity providers, for both Sitecore and in a standalone product. For sitecore this involved creating custom OWIN middleware to support OAUTH PKCE flow, and auth code flows.

Using Azure functions to manage data flows for the Victorian Electoral Commission, as part of building a new public facing website.

Low level profiling and optimization of custom data providers within sitecore to provide "real time" election results.

IE Digital | Melbourne, AU

February 2019 - April 2019

Contract Developer

Remediation of an Umbraco 7 website with an Angular frontend. Remediation activities included:

  • identify and fix bugs
  • refactoring of code to raise maintainability (separation of concerns; SRP)
  • performance improvements
  • rebuild of the CI/CD pipelines to utilise Octopus environment management
  • automated deployment of Umbraco items (data types and document templates) via custom uSync http handler

Loud&Clear | Melbourne, AU

July 2018 - February 2019

Contract Developer

A Sitecore 9/Sitecore Commerce 9 eCommerce implementation for Baby Bunting.

Deloitte Digital | Melbourne, AU

May 2017 - June 2018

Contract Developer

With Deloitte I worked on a number of Sitecore projects for:

  • AustralianSuper
  • MLC Insurance
  • Parks Victoria
  • Visit Victoria
  • Service Victoria

Several of these projects leveraged Deloitte's in-house framework, which I had contributed significantly to in the past, as well as the open source Atlas Sitecore Item Mapper, to which I have also contributed.

BUPA | Melbourne, AU

Oct 2016 - May 2017

Contract Developer

A Sitecore 8 intranet site to provide information to call center operators. In this project we aimed for zero outage deployments, and implemented a blue/green deployment strategy with Visual Studio Team Services and Azure.

Deployments had controlled quality gateways, where a delegated person could approve or disapprove the release at several checkpoints, and a set of automated Selenium smoke tests to provide production verification.

The solution had several other interesting aspects such as:

  • Extensive use and customization of the SOLR search engine in Sitecore, to allow spellchecking, highlighting and faceting of search results
  • Deep integration of Sitecore analytics back into the Sitecore Experience Editor. This allowed authors to see basic sentiment analysis for their content

Deloitte Digital | Melbourne, AU

May 2016 - Oct 2016

Contract Developer

Replatforming of a public website and portal for TelstraSuper to Sitecore 8.2, utilising Sitecore's Helix architecture.

In this project I introduced the mediator pattern, which helped create highly decoupled code and allow elegant use of ideas like domain events.

  • Establish and implement design patterns
  • Architectural review of the solution
  • Code review, including guidance on coding standards and methods
  • Automated build and deploy with Atlassian Bamboo and Octopus deploy

Prototyping scaled, automated deployments of Sitecore websites to Amazon AWS.

  • Completed scripted auto scaling to allow immutable servers
  • Documentation

DT Digital | Melbourne, AU

November 2015 - April 2016

Contract Developer

Migration of Coles supermakets liquor websites (FirstChoice Liquor and Vintage Cellars) from a Sitecore 6.5/Commerce Sever2007 platform to a multisite Sitecore 8/Commerce Server 11 solution.

Deloitte Digital | Melbourne, AU

June 2014 - October 2015

Contract Developer

Implementation of a scaled, multisite Sitecore 7.5 solution.

Three websites were delivered for the Department of Health, Victoria, replacing the Better Health Channel, Seniors Online and the Department of Health websites.

As part of the multisite solution a reference "framework" site was also created as a template for any new websites.

The solution utilised Sitecore 7.5, TDS, heavy use of the Lucene search engine, CI via Bamboo and automated testing.

Acting as lead developer I kept a focus on quality

  • Establish and implement design patterns
  • Architectural review of the solution
  • Code review and mentoring, including guidance on coding standards and methods
  • Automated testing at unit and integration levels; use of Selenium and SpecFlow and automated monitoring of the site while under development

Oakton | Melbourne, AU

March 2014 - June 2014

Contract Developer

Building an Umbraco v6 site with deep integration into an ASP.NET MVC4 web application. A solution was designed to use Umbraco as a resource database, managing all content resources for the MVC application, such as labels, content and validation error messages. Additionally I built out most of the service and security integration for the MVC application. The solution was supported by unit tests leveraging mstest and moq.

Hardwire | Melbourne, AU

February 2014 - March 2014

Contract Developer

Building an Umbraco v6 site for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to provide information on children's vaccination schedules in Australia. The site is built using Bootstrap 3 and Razor templates and makes use of Entity Framework 5 and WCF services to expose functionality to allow parents to sign up for reminders for when their child’s vaccinations are due.

DT Digital | Melbourne, AU

October 2013 - December 2013

Contract Developer

Working as a Sitecore developer for a responsive rebuild of Melbourne Convention Centres website. My focus was on sitecore and the "backend" including design and implementation of all sitecore templates and information architecture, and the integration of external data feeds, Paypal, and Lucene search.

UHG (Unified Healthcare Group) | Melbourne, AU

July 2013 - September 2013

Agile Developer

UHG provide medical services to the insurance industry, government agencies and other businesses.

As a senior developer at UHG I focused on using Selenium and SpecFlow to allow integration and regression testing, and to enable easier behaviour driven development (BDD).

This included building a JavaScript based "testing harness" for a SPA style application, including T4 and JavaScript for generating JavaScript models and views based on C# view models, and mocking third party JavaScript libraries to allow Selenium tests to execute.

TelstraSuper | Melbourne, AU

April 2013 - June 2013

Contract Developer

Working within a serviced oriented architecture (SOA), I was responsible for building new services using WCF and Entity Framework, including unit testing with mstest and creating documentation for their ongoing support.

Village Roadshow | Melbourne, AU

August 2012 - March 2013

Contract Developer

Working as a Sitecore developer across Villages websites for cinemas, theme parks and attractions, with a focus on refactoring and improving the code base. This included introducing simple build and deployment configuration using msbuild and working towards decoupling the existing websites from each other to create a more maintainable solution.

Theme Parks mobile web site

Using Sitecore and the 51degrees mobile detection module, we created a simple mobile website for the Theme Parks business within the Village group.

My focus on this small project was around integration with the existing ecommerce web services and back end code.

Byte IT | Melbourne, AU

August 2011 - August 2012

Senior Developer / Consultant

As a senior developer and consultant, I helped grow the Byte software projects delivery team, creating a talented team of web professionals. I was also responsible for a wide range of day to day activities, including pre-sales, the preparation of estimates and proposals, as well as meeting with new and existing clients to discuss their needs.

Working primarily with the Umbraco Content Management System we created several marketing websites for our clients.

One of our main customers was the Dulux group, for which we were responsible for all of their online presence, over 20 separate websites and brands.

Cabots

The Dulux Cabots brand sells woodcare products to the home "handyman".

The Cabots website was redeveloped from scratch and built on the Umbraco CMS platform. We were able to leverage several of Umbraco's features, including:

  • "Razor" macros bound to strongly typed view models
  • the "/base" services to expose REST-like JSON services
  • the Lucene.NET based Examiner search engine
  • and a rich JavaScript/JQuery based front end that could consume and communicate with these services

This created a rich MVC style solution that allowed us to rapidly implement all of Cabots features inside a very tight timeframe.

Kiandra IT | Melbourne, AU

February 2007 - August 2011

Senior Developer / Consultant

Working as a developer and consultant for Kiandra IT, I delivered solutions to government departments, businesses and startups. I have developed solutions using a broad range of technologies such as ASP.NET WebForms and MVC, Javascript, Silverlight, WPF, Winforms, WCF, NHibernate and SQL Server.

In addition to programming and development my responsibilities covered analysis, design and documentation of solutions and the estimation of effort and cost. I also helped grow our team, being heavily involved in the recruitment of employees.

Some of the projects I helped deliver for Kiandra include:

eNoteFile

Winner of the 2009 Microsoft Worldwide Development Partner of the year for Custom Development Solutions , eNoteFile is a note taking and filing system designed for use on tablet PCs. Built using C#, WPF, Microsoft Sync Services, SQLCE and scalable back end services (WCF, SQL Server), eNote was a challenge and a pleasure to build.

Turtle

Turtle is a network of vending machines connected to a 3G network. A WPF front end and touch screen allows customers to purchase items and top up their prepaid mobiles. Units may be offline and continue to make sales with a local SQL CE cache. The Turtle servers then integrate into payment and SMS gateways. The Turtle units required several interesting technical features, including remote monitoring tools and ZIP compression over the WCF channel.

Victorian Department of Health

The DoH had a new data reporting requirement for hospitals. Working with a business analysts I produced a technical specification and XML schema for the new data feed.

The specification included the data specification, as well as documenting data flow through to the DOH's new data warehousing solution and out to datamarts for final consumption by interested parties.

Additionally, I also worked on the DOH datawarehousing system, creating and deploying several SSIS ETL packages.

And many other solutions using:

  • ASP.NET MVC/JavaScript/JQuery
  • ASP.NET WebForms/AJAX
  • WPF/Silverlight
  • WinForms (including some interesting hardware integration with bar code readers, GPS and accelerometers)
  • Data warehousing and OLAP cubes

AVIS Rent-a-Car Ltd | London, UK

July 2003 - November 2006

Business Analyst

Requirements interviews and creation of functional and technical specification documents.

Senior Developer

As senior developer within the team I successfully delivered a new bespoke security component using Active Directory, NT and anonymous access to allow integrated application security from the legacy NT and new AD domains, as well as external access to the network via an anonymous web server. The component was written in C# .NET 1.1 and exposed a COM compliant interface to allow for backwards compatibility to VB6 and classic ASP.

Working in the AVIS UK Head office solutions were developed in ASP.NET/C# applications for IE6, and in classic ASP/SQL server, all delivered via the AVIS intranet. Some of the systems created include:

  • a vehicle repair tracking system which has allowed better measuring of costs and saved the business nearly £1million in 2005 alone.
  • introduction of data cubes (OLAP/SSAS) for self service reporting

PTDev Limited | London, UK

January 2003 - June 2003

Developer Analyst

PTDev specialised in providing a range of technology & programming based support services to the communications industry.

The software architecture was based around a 3 tier COM+ model using Visual Basic 6 and SQL Server 2000. XML was used heavily as the main data transport mode.

Datacom Systems Limited | Wellington, NZ

November 1999 - November 2001

Developer Analyst

Lead developer on the New Zealand Immigration Services Application Management System, which allows the creation and management of clients and Visa/Permit applications. This system had up to 500 clients simultaneously connected globally, with a SQL Server database distributed over 30 offices around the world.

In addition to a Bachelor of Technology majoring in Information Engineering from Massey University in New Zealand I also hold a number of professional certifications.

http://au.linkedin.com/in/mcevoyben/ 0403 735 700