Brett Christensen

I was previously a C# focused developer for around 10 years. I became interested in the functional programming aspects of the language via LINQ but was still constantly frustrated by a lack of immutable types. I made the leap to Scala 2 years ago and have not looked back since. I now use Scala for most projects in my day job and have built high traffic APIs and background service workers using it.

C# and it's related technologies are where I have the most experience of all. In my day job I build and maintain multiple high traffic APIs and background services and many are written in C#. I'm well versed in unit testing, dependency injection, and good software craftsmanship. Most recently I ported an API that was previously running on windows servers to run under mono so that it could run under Docker on Linux. The same API now runs under .net core for improved performance and stability

I work on the search team for a major employment website, and proposed and implemented the moving of all our search technology to elasticsearch. As such I have experience with implementing "core search" relevance algorithms in this search engine rather than just using it as a store for logstash as many people do. Performance is very important so I have experience in query tuning also

AWS is my preferred cloud technology platform. Since leading a team responsible implementing for Continuous Delivery at my company I have been exposed daily to AWS and many of its components. I have set up DNS using route 53, used S3 for storage and basic web hosting, cloud formation for deploying repeatable scripted stacks (very important for true continuous delivery), DynamoDB as a NoSQL database, Elastic Beanstalk both for hosting web applications and service workers, and the list goes on. Of course I'm also familiar with EC2, including autoscaling, Elastic load balancing etc.

I can still remember the time when I just did not get Git. Having come from more traditional centralised version control systems like TFS, the idea of being able to branch instantly seemed like some kind of black magic to me. Once I grokked git though I realised it's power and can't imagine ever having to go back. While it's now second nature to me, I still remember well the learning curve and I'm here to help you through it. I can take you through how to use it, what is a pull vs a rebase vs a fast forward merge and more.I can still remember the time when I just did not get Git. Having come from more traditional centralised version control systems like TFS, the idea of being able to branch instantly seemed like some kind of black magic to me. Once I grokked git though I realised it's power and can't imagine ever having to go back. I can take you through how to use it, what is a pull vs a rebase vs a fast forward merge and more.