Skills Matrix
All skills and technologies detailed in this matrix have been used extensively,
unless otherwise stated.
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Overview
Neil Cresswell has over 28 years experience as a professional software developer, architecting solutions and writing code for large corporations such as Microsoft, (Microsoft's Advanced Technology Group in Redmond,) Demand Media, Oracle Corporation, Bank of America and Barclays Bank as well leading development teams while remaining a hands-on web developer for numerous start-ups and dot-coms such as eVenues.com, Trails.com, GolfLink.com, Travels.com, Reel.com, GardenGuides.com, RunThePlanet.com, Run.com and Achieva.com (now KapTest.com.) He currently works in the Seattle area and resides on Bainbridge Island, a short ferry commute from downtown Seattle.
Equally capable of working on extracting business requirements, resource and project management, systems architecture, design, layout and user experience, front-end development (both for Windows applications and web applications,) mid-tier DLL and application/business layer coding, batch processes and feeds, back end database design and development, formalized testing, SEO and metrics tracking, optimization for performance and scalability, security hardening at both the application level (XSS and SQL injection, etc.) and the operating system level, deployment, version management, production support and server farm and data center management, Neil is capable of providing a very rare combination of in-depth experience at every level, covering all aspects of a site or application's development and deployment.
If I had to summarize my strengths, two things in particular come to mind:
A wide range of in-depth skills covering all of the roles needed to successfully take an idea from inception to release.
An emphasis on quality at every step. I firmly believe putting in a little extra time getting the design of a framework right or unit testing and debugging thoroughly up-front saves a lot of time in the long run, even on rapid prototyping projects, in fact more so on these projects since the code goes through so many design iterations. Clean, readable, commented code and good programming practices are always a must. Neil Cresswell.
Technologies used include ASP (since 1997) and .Net (since 2001) with JavaScript, including hand-crafted code and libraries such as jQuery and with CSS, XHTML, XML and AJAX for client-side web development.
Most DLL and EXE development has been with Visual Basic. Neil has 18 years experience with VB v3 to v6 and .Net. He has developed database solutions since 1984 including 17 years of RDBMS development going against Informix, Oracle and Microsoft SQL servers.
Neil has been managing development teams since 2000 and was Director of Engineering at Demand Media from 2005 through 2009, with the responsibility for running several development teams and production web farms, rapidly developing a slew of highly profitable web sites that were ranked #1 in their various markets, (based on independent traffic analyses,) while staying hands-on with some of the trickier architecture and coding. More recently, in 2009 and 2010 Neil Cresswell has assisted eVenues.com in their pre-investment phase, helping with coding but primarily assisting in managing their off-shore development teams and advising their executive team.