Five Years

Struan King's CV

I am a pro-active, knowledgeable programmer with over 9 years experience in a range of fields. I have covered development, project management and frequently gather requirements and analyse information in-order to deliver appropriate solutions.

I am keen to work with new technologies — I recently used YQL to solve a problem on which.co.uk. My ideal role would involve a healthy slice of front-end work with a focus on accessibility and well structured HTML with efficient JavaScript and CSS thrown in.

At present I'm very interested in performance and in the process of implementing a series of improvements that will lower the page load times of many pages on which.co.uk.

Skills

Programming

HTML (including HTML5)
CSS
JavaScript (including jQuery)
XML, XSLT
Velocity, JEXL
YQL
PHP
SQL
Maven

Applications

Percussion Rhythmyx Content Management
SVN
Mercurial
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft Office
Adobe (Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash)
Mac OS X

Methodologies and Frameworks

Scrum/Agile
Prince2

Experience

Percussion (Rhythmyx) CMS and Front-End Team Leader Which? (Mar 07 – present)

Joining Which? In 2007 I was part of a highly successful team that upgraded the CMS, re-designed the architecture of it to support a brand new which.co.uk in 2008.

In mid-2008 I became the CMS team leader guiding the team to a significant number of successes. What had previously been a major bottleneck and source of discontent for business users has become an efficient tool that performs well. Through excellent collaboration the CMS team have implemented 100 successful releases without rollbacks; delivering benefits frequently and timely.

I also extended the CMS by using AJAX to lookup additional information in a separate database. This was crucial to the launch of the 'Cars' section of which.co.uk.

My interest in front-end work allowed me to introduce the concept of JavaScript name-spacing and using the object literal approach. Name-spacing protects the internal functions and variables from being affected by third party components. The object literal helps promote better code quality.

In 2010 front-end responsibilities were added to my role and I played a significant part in the re-alignment of which.co.uk that was launched in September 2010.

I'm responsible for the client side coding standards at Which? and I've referenced authoritative figures such as Douglas Crockford, Chris Heillmann, Roger Johansson, Eric Mayer, Joe Clark, Ian Lloyd and Tantek Celik to make them industry standard.

My current focus involves a workplan of front-end improvements primarily to improve performance but also quality. Examples are; the Maven build tool (commonly used for Java projects) to compress and aggregate CSS and JavaScript files into appropriate packages, JsLinting, and PNG file compression with PNGout.

Website Manager Scottish Borders Council (2006-2007)

Restored confidence in corporate content management system.
Resolved many critical errors.
Introduced effective processes for dealing with queries and requests.
Chaired the web content consultation group.
Arranged 'Writing for the web' courses to ensure content was clear.
Provided training for the CMS system – groups and one-to-one.
Managed day-to-day requests, checked logs and advised on content structure.

IT Systems Support Officer Scottish Borders Council (2000-2006)

Re-designed the corporate intranet.
Designed a pure CSS layout for the Scottish Borders Council website in 2003.
Project managed the installation of an Environmental Health application.
Implemented "Ecare" - the Scottish Borders Borders Ability website.
Installed public facing Windows servers to NSA security standards.
Completed Prince2 Foundation and Practitioner exams.

Education

University of St. Andrews

BSc. Honours in Mathematics (2:2)

High School

CSYS level – Chemistry (A), Mathematics (B)
Highers – Accounting (A), Chemistry (A), Mathematics (A), Physics (A), English (B), History (B)

References

Available on request