about me

Hi!

I'm a development manager, developer, person who's fascinated with and by technology, cook, sometimes blogger, mixologist, gardener and perhaps most importantly (to her, at least!) personal slave and attendant to a cat.

The cat!

Yes - this cat, stealer of beds!

I've spent the last decade (give or take a few months) working in the Telecomms industry for Ultracomms who're a provider (and in fact, the first in the UK!) of cloud-based call centre solutions, first as a developer and then progressing through to managing the development department, covering QA, Development and DBA areas.

Whilst with Ultracomms, I was responsible for managing the development (and some of the "doing" the development) of the software and solutions that were responsible for 8 million talk minutes a month and up to £2,500,000 in card payments taken by Ultracomms customers, again per month, in a PCI compliant manner. The latter involved developing integration solutions with Realex, Barclaycard ePDQ, Cashflows, WorldPay, SagePay and others to allow each of Ultracomms customers to use their preferred payment gateway whilst still having a secure payment solution that removed their call floor from PCI compliance scope.

During my time at Ultracomms, I also contributed to and ended up being named on a patent: 2016092320 Telephone call processing - ever answered a call, said "Hello" and suffered a few seconds of dead air before the agent in the call centre replies? That's what's referred to as "Answer Machine Detection" in play. It. Doesn't. Work. Well. Hence, the patent for a solution that does.

If, for reasons best known to you, you're looking for my CV, you can download a copy here.

A summer party for friends is always best when you've got a cocktail bar setup!

Other pieces of me on the web

profile for Rob at Stack Overflow, Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers

profile for Rob on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites