Tom Maslen

Responsibilities

Temporarily responsible for co-ordinating recruitment, best working practices and maintaining a large codebase between 5 development teams. I did this role alongside my Tech Lead responsibilities to backfill the engineering manager's vacancy. This included:

• Improving the recruitment process for the entire department.
• Setting up and running working groups to improve communication and working practices between teams.
• Running monthly departmental meetings for developers.
• Coordinating developer resource between teams.
• Mentoring other tech leads.
• Consulting News management on all technical concerns.

Responsibilities

Responsible for the technical direction and line management (10 developers) of the Visual Journalism team within BBC News. Duties include:

• Running the department trainee scheme: advertise, interview, hire and integrate 6 trainee web developers (university students on work experience year) into multiple teams each year.
• Lead a development team of software engineers to provide online tools that allow journalists to create charts and other formats for the BBC website, BBC News app and social media.
• Liaise with editorial and design staff to come up with ideas and technical implementations for original, interactive visual journalism.
• Mentor a large team of developers to improve development workflow and help them progress their careers.
• Provide technical expert consultation to the rest of the BBC in management meetings, running research projects and technical writing.
• But also (most importantly) still complete visual journalism projects myself ☺.

My team creates unique visual journalism, from data driven infographics (NHS Winter), interactive page components (clickable guides, The Last Dornier Bomber), charts (Syria's Refugee Exodus), maps (Election 2015: The political battleground, Primary league tables: Regional picture), long form (The Lost Sons), quizzes (Quiz of the year: Who said that?) and other original online journalism (2014 Budget Calculator, Common Weath Games Calculator).

Key achievements

• Efficiently scaled up development resources for the department via the trainee scheme.
• Migrated team onto AWS.
• Increased the BBC editorial staff's ability to produce visual journalism via online tooling.
• Improved the business' ability to syndicate content by creating a technique to make iframes responsive.
• Massively simplified the team's ability to produce multilingual content by creating grunt-multi-lang-site-generator.

Skills used

• AWS: EC2 provisioning and running, ELB, CloudFormation, IAM, S3, SES and CloudWatch.
• Advanced JavaScript (AMD, jQuery, backbone.js, lodash.js, D3.js, Google JSAPI).
• Responsive Web Design (mobile first CSS, CSS3, HTML5, Sass).
• Server side programming using PHP (Zend and phpUnit), NodeJS and Ruby.
• Command line tooling and infrastructure with Git, Docker, Grunt.js, VirtualBox, Vagrant and Hudson.
• Professional development process using TTD, BDD, phpUnit, Jasmine.js, Sinon.js, Cucumber and Wraith (for automated visual regression testing).

Responsibilities

JavaScript specialist in a large team, focused on developing the client side strategy for all future BBC News products. Duties also included:

• Using BDD and TDD development techniques, created modular, testable object oriented PHP and AMD JavaScript to a very high industrial standard.
• Helped to develop a test suite written in Ruby.
• Recruited other team members.
• Mentored junior members of BBC News teams via code reviews and pair programming.
• Worked in a mixed discipline (developers, testers and designers) team using agile methodology.

Achievements

• Re-launched BBC News online, creating a code base using responsive design principles.
• Helped our industry to define how to implement responsive web design by talking at conferences and blogging about performance and browser support.
• Created a new technique using progressive enhancement to support every web browser on all devices: Cutting the mustard

Skills used

• Advanced JavaScript (AMD, jQuery)
• Responsive Web Design (mobile first CSS, CSS3, HTML5, Sass)
• Server side programming using PHP (Zend and phpUnit) and Ruby
• Command line tooling and infrastructure with Git, Grunt.js, Virtual Box, Vagrant and Hudson
• Professional development process using TTD, BDD, phpUnit, Jasmine.js, Sinon.js and Cucumber

Responsibilities

• Lead developer for BBC Bitesize from 2010 to 2011, liaised with editorial staff and designers to maintain the site, build new content and fix bugs.
• Developer for Glow.js - the BBC's internal JavaScript library (now deprecated) - built new features and provided technical support to the BBC development community (200+ developers).
• Built numerous microsites in a mixed discipline team (project managers, designers and testers).

Achievements

• Part of the team that launched Glow.js as an open source project.
• Created the game "Keyboard Hero" to highlight how to develop complex JavaScript applications using Glow.js

Skills used

• Advanced JavaScript (AMD, jQuery)
• Created accessible HTML/CSS to a very high standard to support the high volume of traffic the BBC site receives.
• Server side programming using PHP (Zend and phpUnit) and Ruby
• Professional development process using TTD, phpUnit and qUnit

Responsibilities

• Delivering customised holiday booking websites for multiple high profile brands in the UK (Expedia, Disney, CO-OP).
• QAing and mentoring the design team (2 other staff).
• Supporting managers and customers in meetings and over the phone.

Skills used

• HTML, JavaScript & CSS
• Creating designs in PhotoShop
• ASP.NET

Responsibilities

• Maintained the customer facing ecommerce website
• Created and maintained multiple intranet systems to help run the company

Achievements

• Created a import process to synchronize two business systems, exporting data from PostGres to import it into MicroSoft SQL Server.

Skills used

• HTML, JavaScript & CSS.
• PHP
• .NET (C#)
• MicroSoft Office scripting using Visual Basic

Responsibilities

Worked in a team to deliver a variety of centrally maintained services including:

• The first ever news feeds to the BBC homepage
• The BBC's site wide Single Sign On service
• Presentation layer for a large CMS

Skills used

• HTML, JS & CSS
• XSLT