#!/giles/rapkin.com

CV


Profile

A self motivated and enthusiastic developer. Able to use own initiative and work well as part of a team. Primary development experience in PHP and Perl with solid MySQL and Apache skills. Good problem solving and analytical skills.

Key Skills

Languages/Technologies

PHP, Perl, Java, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, MySQL, Apache, Objective-C/Cocoa

Operating Systems

FreeBSD 4/6, Linux (RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu), OS X, Windows NT/2000/XP

Employment History

Current Position

Engineer, Audience Engineering, Yahoo! Inc, London
October 2006 - Present

Responsibilities

  • Maintaining Yahoo! Europe's existing messageboard platform and property integrations.
  • Rolling out platform upgrades and integrating with new Yahoo! properties.
  • BCP compliance of entertainment/messageboard properties.

Achievements

  • Performed 3 major upgrades to the European messageboards platform
  • Planned out and helped execute BCP compliance of European Movies and TV properties

Past positions

Mobile Engineer, Connected Life, Yahoo! Inc, London
June 2006 – October 2006

Responsibilities

  • Developing and deploying new properties for Yahoo’s European mobile web portals.
  • Maintaining the existing European mobile web portals and properties.

Achievements

  • Launched a new home page for the European mobile web portals to tie in with the launch of the new Yahoo! home page (XHTML-MP, CSS, C++).
  • Launched a new search property on the mobile web portals in Germany, Spain, France and Italy (PHP, XHTML-MP, CSS).
  • Launched a new Yahoo! Photos property on the mobile web portals (PHP, XHTML-MP, CSS).
  • Developed a solution to allow users to sign up to, and manage, SMS mail alerts via the mobile mail property (PHP, XHTML-MP, CSS).

Senior Agent Developer, Marketplace/Commerce, Yahoo! Inc, London
January 2005 – June 2006

Responsibilities

  • Develop new backoffice and developer tools to help the agent team work more effectively
  • Mentoring new members of the agent team
  • Providing support for the other developers in the agent team

Achievements

  • Developed a developer tool to enable rapid development of Agents (Crawlers that extract product information from clients feeds or web sites) (Java)
  • Built an online task management system for the agent team that was capable of automatically assigning tasks to the correct developer (PHP, XHTML, CSS, Perl)
  • Built an online stats system that collects various pieces of information on each of the merchants on the commerce site and display it in a useful way. (PHP, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl)
  • Developed a backoffice tool to automate the generation of Inside Yahoo! links and associated search terms, for inclusion in Y! search, from product data on Yahoo! Shopping. (PHP, XHTML, CSS, Perl).

Agent Developer, Kelkoo.com (UK) Ltd/Yahoo Inc, London
November 2002 – December 2004

Responsibilities

  • Build and maintain Adapters.
  • Ensure smooth running of the site.
  • Liaise with merchants to solve any technical issues they may have.

Achievements

  • Developed a threaded filling solution for running agents that resulted in a significant reduction in execution time (Perl).
  • Developed a formal technical specification for merchants to guide them through the integration process, which resulted in merchants producing more consistent feeds.

Education

1999 – 2002 Royal Military College of Science (Cranfield University)

BEng (Hons) in Software Engineering
Level awarded: 2.1

Projects included:-

  • Final year project: Performance optimisation of Java
  • Final year group project: Development of a route planning and guidance system for an autonomous vehicle in Java.
  • Development of an employee payroll system in Java
  • Development of a sea vessel classification system using Prolog and Flex (Group Project)

1997 – 1999 Moulton Sixth Form, Moulton, Northampton

  • Computing: B
  • Design: C
  • History: C

1992 – 1997 Moulton School, Moulton, Northampton

  • English Literature: B
  • English Language: C
  • Mathematics: C
  • Science: CC
  • History: B
  • BSIT: B
  • French: B
  • Design: B
© 2008 Giles Rapkin Developed using the YUI