Kristian Lake
Professional Full Stack Developer and DevOps Engineer.
I Have over a decade of experience as a Software Engineer and Software Developer.
Currently looking for exciting, bleeding edge remote roles in the blockchain industry
Skills
I bring an enormous amount of knowledge beyond the languages and tools used, But knowledge such as how and why to setup pipelines such as CI/CD, The importance of good working methodologies (such as Scrum), The importance of good development standards and test standards right though to the importance of security on the production servers.
Professional Experience
Test Automation Engineer
I had the oppotunity to learn some more skills as a Test Automation Engineer - Specifically the Testing section of the pipeline.
I help write automation of tools using Java and C# and helped create the testing architecure using Jenkins, Selenium, Docker.
Build and Release Co-Ordinator
I moved over into the development team more for this role to manage code being developed and co-ordinated the delivery of build artifacts though JIRA whilst also working on CI/CD Pipeline solutions integrated with Jenkins, JIRA and Kubernetes
Release Automation Engineer
In order to recognise my skillset had become specialised a new team was created
I became completely responsible for the automation and developing of new solutions for new areas of the business we took on.
Some of the things implemented in this role were things such as A CI/CD pipeline solution integrated into Jenkins and JIRA to increase efficiency in the deployment pipeline and a separate research project working with Kubernetes looking at deployment pipelines that could potentially benefit inside a K8 cluster.
Senior Production Release Engineer
In addition to the normal responsibilities I also took on training and owning the more technical aspects.
During my time as a Senior we plugged in some software called Automic.
I developed the automation workflows. These workflows allowed us to increase our ability to deploy over 400 releases a week with a very high success rate (99%) and our release windows are 15 minutes or less.
Production Release Engineer
When I started we were a brand new team of four, able to deploy around 50 releases a week manually with batch scripts (which I had written).
We release over 700 products to thousands of servers across the world.
I wrote the first level of automation in C# designed to reduce the errors and increase productivity. This allowed us to grow the team further and deploy more releases in the week.
We started to take on releases for other areas of the business. The release engineer team grew to 12 staff and two senior roles opened up
.Net Lead Developer
GZero was a very challenging job role because it was a small business startup team with only 7 members.
We created a product for the iPhone called VoCal
I wrote the Apple Push Notification service (using ASP.Net) backend for this app connecting to a MSSQL Database.
We also created GBoost. A Desktop application that communicated to a server for updates. I created the front end client using C#, the back end Web Service using ASP.Net, and a SQL database using MSSQL.
Due to the nature of a small business startup this job regularly needed you to wear many hats for the different roles.
- Joined GZero in an extremely challenging role producing business standard web services, client applications, windows services and SQL databases
- On demand learning when required, including learning how to use SQL, and learning how to build an Apple Push notification service in a high pressure, high demand role
- Built and released updates to a development server for testing and then onto a production server
- Was responsible for creating and prioritizing my own workload
Build And Release Engineer
Joined bet365 in a challenging role with complex release environments.
The main web farm consisted of over 300 machines in cluster formation, and several smaller web clusters for other applications
Bet365 at this time did not have a dedicated Build and Release Engineer department or team. Developers were doing their own deployments.
I came in and created the first Build and Release processes and tools used to deploy to the servers.
- Managing releases over 10 production environments and documenting live releases for 10 environments, including Client, Middletier and Web servers
- Managing multiple build machines with over 20 separate solutions, including solutions with over 70 modules
- Wrote my own in house tools to automate much of the change and release process using c# WinForms and maintained and improved them
Portfolio
Undisclosed Project
The wallet is nearly alpha complete but so far this project has shown me everything I need to know in relation to
blockchains, using smart contracts, full front end and back end website support with API and MongoDB integration
Link Soon
We Share Abundance (WESA)
Link Soon - Site not quite released yet
GBoost
This project was created over 10 years ago so please excuse the links to Youtube and the less than stellar video quality.
Please watch the links below to see the app in action.
MajorGeeks 2010 Review Of Gboost
GBoost vs Game Booster
Glimpse of the old website
Vocal
We had created and released one of the most polished voice calendar reminder apps out at the time.
VoCal in action
Interests
I really enjoy playing video games - Like ALOT!. I tend to gravatate towards FPS games such as Call of Duty and Battlefield, But I also have times when I just want to hop into a survival game (Subnautica was great!) or go experience one of the many great single player games like Tomb Raider
I also love watching sci-fi and fantasy movies and television shows (I have probably seen most of them!) - Sometimes you just need to relax and turn off the grey matter!
I have a keen interest in the Crypto space currently, although the AI/MLOps space is starting to pique my interest too! Currently I am going to be focusing on Crypto projects as I want to add Blockchain Development to my skillset.