Dean Bowler

Returning to Oakbrook Finance with the role of Technical Architect, I have largely been responsible for developing, documenting and reviewing contributions towards our target architecture

• Strategised and implemented frameworks to bring our in-house design language/system in line with our React implementation. This was particularly challenging given the unique requirements, where 3rd party design systems are a poor fit. Following the initial work I have mentored and upskilled developers in how to contribute, as well as ensuring design and tech are talking the same language.
• Migrated from the Auth0 authentication platform to Azure B2C for a cost saving of circa £90,000 pa.
• Introduced usage of TypeScript to the business, running training sessions to upskill developers and sell the benefits of static type-checking.
• Lead an initiative to onboard Datadog monitoring and instrumentation for system observability.

Frontend focussed, fullstack development for a Rightmove challenger property portal. This involved working with React, .NET core, Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Service Bus. Utilising change Cosmos DB feeds to work within an event sourcing architecture was particularly interesting.

• Readily adapted to numerous secondments, utilising my skillset to accelerate delivery timelines.
• Designed and implemented valuable internal tooling both towards day-to-day business processes and system diagnosis / remediation.

Technical leadership & development of personal loans brochureware, loan application frontend/infrastructure as well as internal support and operations tooling; built with React, asp.net RESTful APIs and NServiceBus.

• Leadership of a mixed inhouse and contract developer team, orchestrating and facilitating communication between both key stakeholders and other development teams
• Lead a frontend “chapter”, a cross-team collective of developers, with the purpose of developing and maintaining best practices, patterns and technology choices.
• Introduced usage of TypeScript to the business, running training sessions to upskill developers and sell the benefits of static type-checking.
• Lead UX/UI of internal developer tooling as well as subsequent domain driven design and implementation.

Full stack development of a clinical information aggregation portal; consisting of SOAP services for interfacing via Patient Administration Systems, RESTful APIs to query aggregated data for user interfaces and an Angular front-end application featuring a customisable dashboard with customisable widget framework.

• Improved development workflow by modernising the client-side build pipeline, removing the necessity to store compiled output and frustration of resolving conflicts whilst working collaboratively.
• Mentored student group projects in affiliation with the local university as well as continued mentorship on subsequent internships.
• Took upon the role of scrum master, encouraging positive change around our processes as well acting as an agile coach to less experienced members.
• Utilised the D3.js framework to create bespoke clinical graphs, facilitating the digitisation of patient observation recordings.

Maintained and developed robust, secure Web Services for transmission, storage, management and online visualisation of vast amounts of geological survey data; comprised of an ASP.Net MVC website, RESTful web services, Windows services and WPF Windows applications.

• Created a working proof-of-concept for a modern, mobile-friendly, responsive re-design of the web portal; lead implementation and UI/UX design to actualise this concept in production.
• Undertook performance analysis of database schema to maintain high throughput of services.
• Performed security analysis, fixing a variety of vulnerabilities within inherited legacy code, including Cross Site Request Forgery, Cross Site Scripting and SQL Injection.