About

Hi, I'm Damian Moore and I hope you've found some interesting content on my site. I started this as a personal homepage in 2002, made it into a blog in 2008 and now also use it as a place to document some of the personal projects I've worked on.

Key Skills

  • Back-end — Python, Django, Flask, Node JS, REST and GraphQL APIs, Performance optimisation, Caching, Memcached, Redis, Gevent, Celery, RabbitMQ, MySQL, PostgreSQL, App Engine.

  • Front-end — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Next.js, Redux, Webpack, PWAs, Graphics.

  • Data engineering / Data science— Tensorflow, Keras, Spark ML, MMLSpark, SKLearn, Pandas, Matplotlib.

  • Devops — Linux admin, Cloud services (AWS + Google Cloud), CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, Reproducible configuration of web, proxy, email servers etc.

  • Testing — Unit tests, Integration Tests, TDD, BDD, Selenium, Cypress, Jenkins, Travis.

Employment

Tandem Bank — Principal Data Engineer (Permanent) — Feb 2018 to Dec 2019

Tandem is a challenger bank that aims to do as much as possible to help their customers by getting to know them better. By analysing spending and other behaviours they are able to help with bills, cash-flow, product selection and more.

I was hired as their first Python engineer, at a time when they were just starting to build a Data Science team. I worked closely with the Data Scientists to get their models running in an automated fashion, using the scalable compute and storage resources of AWS. Some of the projects I deployed were predicting customer spending money and safe-to-save amounts, detecting fraudulent credit card applications and identifying where to direct marketing spend. The main technologies involved Spark/Jupyter/Livy on EMR, Tensorflow/Keras on Docker/EC2/Fargate, Atlas with S3 as metadata store and data lake, Kinesis as an event stream and AWS Lambda for lightweight processing.

As well writing code I distributed work with colleagues at an outsourcing firm based in Poland whilst also trying to grow the in-house data engineering team.

Hoop — Full-stack developer (Contract, then permanent) — Feb 2015 to Jan 2018

Hoop helps families find great things to do with their kids. They have over 1M users in the UK using the Android and iOS apps to discover and book events, classes and workshops nearby. Results can be filtered and suggested according to algorithmic signals. Content comes from both a remote team of curators and third-party organisers who manage their own listings.

I was hired during the formation of the tech team, along with another developer, due to my experience with Python, building scalable architectures and user interfaces. We set about building a library to connect several microservices together via RabbitMQ. Several parts were adopted from Django such as the ORM, authentication and templating. The next stage was building the custom CMS for quick and accurate data entry. I built a stack using React, Redux, SASS, Webpack and Django fed from database-backed task queues.

I am proud of the well-optimised CI/CD pipeline we built based on Docker and Kubernetes.

FusePump — Back-end developer (Contract) — Dec 2014

FusePump run a variety of managed services based around e-commerce and web scraping. Historically their back-end codebase was all PHP-based but they had started experimenting with Python and Django for a couple of new projects. During this short contract I advised developers on best practices, set up automated test infrastructure and extended admin interfaces.

Ostmodern — Back-end developer (Contract) — Aug 2014 to Nov 2014

Ostmodern are digital product designers, video-on-demand specialists and content delivery experts. They work closely with leading media, broadcast and sports brands. I worked as the sole back-end developer on two projects whilst there.

The first was a website re-build for an organisation that tracks statistics of football managers and their clubs. The project was based on Django/Wagtail and involved writing a lot of scripts to import stats, copy and images.

The second project was to develop a web-based pain management exercise programme for a health care company. Patients used the system daily, entered progress and the programme adapted for subsequent days.

Pancentric Digital — Full-stack developer (Contract) — Feb 2014 to Jul 2014

Pancentric Digital is a lively digital agency with a wide variety of client projects to build. One of the larger projects was a group of sites for a leading bus company group. It involved real-time external APIs and alerting users about delays to their chosen routes. It was developed in Django and ran tens of different regional sites.

I also developed a re-usable Django application calledModerated Social which was used for at least three social branding campaigns. It ran photo competitions where the public could participate by posting to Instagram, Twitter or Facebook using a particular hashtag. Photos got imported, displayed, then voted on with a leader board.

onefinestay — Full-stack, then front-end developer (Permanent) — Jan 2012 to Jan 2014

onefinestay is a luxury holiday accommodation agent renting out homes in popular cities across the world. The company needed internal tools to handle cleaning, meeting guests, marketing promotion and guiding guests around their city. Other areas I specialised in were payment processing, custom CMS’, work-flow tools for operations, single-page backbone apps and APIs for native mobile apps.

I saw large changes at onefinestay and the tech team nearly quadrupled in size to about 30 people during my time there. As the team grew we separated into platform and front-end teams to make things more manageable. In order to help develop other’s knowledge I often gave presentations and assisted with introductory coding tutorial sessions for the whole company.

ReportLab — Full-stack developer (Permanent) — Sep 2008 to Jan 2012

ReportLab is a company that builds tailored web applications for the travel, financial and printing industries. A fundamental part of almost all the systems I built was automated PDF creation. The PDF library used for this was created in-house (also called ReportLab) and is the most popular free/open-source library in the Python world. A big appeal for me was being able to improve, manage and support these open-source releases.

Interests

Programming, web development, open source software, collaboration, design, photography, electronics, network security, the environment, 3D printing, CNC machining, snowboarding, playing saxophone.

Education

Essex University (2005–2008) — B.Sc. (Hons.) Computer Science

Norton Knatchbull School (1998–2005) — A-levels: ICT, Business Studies, Product Design.