Fast, Free & Private way to sign PDFs

Available at signatur.aprets.me.
A simple static in-browser app that allows you to sign PDFs. Developed due to the apparent lack of simple, free & user-friendly PDF signing solutions. The app is completely client-side and does not send user data to any servers. You can select images of your signatures & initials from your device and the app will place a random initial or signature in the PDF where desired. Once done you can download the signed PDF.

Web remote management interface for headless Windows streaming servers

Allows the user to remotely control server power, active output screen and lets them manage HyperV Virtual Machines on the server. Status and statistics are streamed to the user in real-time allowing for full remote management. PowerShell and NVIDIA System Management Interface were used to collect data and interact with Windows internals. The project was created to easily manage servers accessed using remote control software like Parsec, RDP etc.

Prototype DX-focused infrastructure management platform on top of public cloud

"Heroku-like" experience for managing infrastructure with full flexibility and pricing of public cloud (GCP for the prototype). Works on top of the user's stack (GCP, Terraform Cloud) leaving them in full control of their infrastructure. Multiple workspaces can be managed which can contain Virtual Machines, SQL Databases and Serverless Docker Container deployments. The project offers comprehensive guidance and help to maximally simplify operations and allow easy onboarding of new hires and engineers with limited cloud experience.

Turned 2 week long processes into a 5 minute automation

Lead a small team in automating Elanco's infrastructure management process. Turned multiple manual infrastructure requests that took 2 weeks to complete into an automation which required no cloud platform knowledge and took 5 minutes to run. Used Infrastructure-as-code, Node.js, Terraform and deeply integrated with GitHub, GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps APIs to simplify infrastructure management. Successfully presented the solution to the company's CTO leading to the tool's use as a basis for automation work both internally and on external vendor projects.

Overhauled website development and management experience

Co-designed and developed a next-generation toolkit for website development and management at Elanco. Tightly integrated TypeScript, React, Next.js with Kentico Kontent Headless CMS to produce an intuitive visual “What You See Is What You Get” website building and editing experience which was drastically more flexible and capable. The new solution significantly reduced time to market and brought order of magnitude cost savings. Worked with users and stakeholders to collect feedback and enhance the solution. The project received C-Level sponsorship, runs over 100 webpages and is used in onboarding of 100+ site rebuilds as part of Bayer acquisition.

Personal website and Next.js static hosting benchmark

Personal website that you are currently visiting 🙃. Built in Next.js instead of static generators like Astro to allow for potential future server-side needs. The website is hosted on and load balanced between Vercel and Cloudflare Pages to compare their static hosting and CDN performance. The website is in itself a benchmark, collecting page load statistics between the two platforms. See /benchmark for more details and results!

A VPN business I ran while in High School

A profitable VPN service fully developed and managed by me which had multiple UK servers and over 100 customers. Set up the server and cloud infrastructure for a VPN service to function. Designed Docker micro-services for the service. Developed and deployed custom OpenVPN based software for clients to connect to the service. Installed and managed a billing solution to receive payments from customers. Provided customer support to users of the service. Operations were halted due to the business taking too much of my personal time while in University.

Helped technically assess candidates & mentored university students

Took part in the recruitment process for Software Engineering and IT roles. Designed and assessed technical interviews and helped with interviewing applicants and evaluating their performance. Participated in two “Client Projects” with Sheffield Hallam University where students worked on projects with Elanco as a client. Attended multiple meetings as an engineer from Elanco's side to work with the students to convert requirements to more detailed designs and then solutions. Assisted with implementation details to meet Elanco's standards. This included mentoring different students and groups in multiple engagements with Sheffield Hallam University.

Explored, analysed and evaluated the platform to improve operations

Worked with Google Cloud representatives during Google Cloud migration to analyse and evaluate cloud services new to the company, design and redefine architectures compatible with existing processes. Used Infrastructure-as-Code and Terraform to explore and implement designed architectures in practice evaluating real-world performance and limitations. Heavily pushed for use of innovative services such as Cloud Run resulting in better performance and orders of magnitude cost savings.

An updated and extended GitHub Action to enforce Conventional Commits

Created for the needs of a separate project. This action fixes upstream bugs and adds extra features such as customizing allowed conventional commit types. The action reads the relevant commits (intended for use on PRs) and checks if all commit messages comply with conventional commits. If not the action will fail the PR check.

2017-18 CS Project. IaaS/BYOD --> Container PaaS orchestrator.

A project to simplify management of cloud infrastructure needed to run containers in production in 2017. It worked with DigitalOcean and BYO docker hosts. Docker and Rancher were used to manage containers once the host VM or server were set up. The project also included a small ODM with connectors for MongoDB and GCP Datastore as well as a custom JSON validation layer. Most of the functionality is nowadays part of the core Rancher project.

Office IT

Designed, implemented and managed all office IT infrastructure. Installed HPE/Dell servers (including OS installation and management). Designed and managed LAN and WLAN networks with Ubiquiti Hardware (Routers, Switches, Access Points). Set up and managed a VMware vSphere including all the underlying software and hardware. Monitored IT Infrastructure and networks to maintain availability. Troubleshooted IT infrastructure as well as office hardware and software (PCs, Mobile Phones, Laptops).

Improved and unified software quality and security testing

Designed and developed a Software Quality and Security Testing Framework for the DevOps team. Replaced multiple fragmented CI pipelines with a powerful and easy-to-use unified Python powered solution. Automatically identified and classified different parts of the codebase to run a maximally comprehensive suite of quality and security tests. Deeply integrated with Azure DevOps (API) to collect data and utilise its UI to display results, hints and suggestions as well as allow for project configuration. Provided more powerful scanning and testing capabilities and improved user experience by directly highlighting code snippets in question in Azure DevOps UI and providing comprehensive guidance on resolving issues. Final solution only required one line of code to use.

Install & Run Cloudflare Tunnel on Ubiquiti network gateways

Cloudflare Tunnel allows for secure remote access to a network with no extra configuration and simple remote management from Cloudflare Zero Trust Dashboard. This project provides the scripts to install cloudflared (which can create a tunnel to the network) on a USG. This allows for creation of a tunnel to a network without any additional hardware. The scripts use the semi-reverse-engineered boot sequence configuration of EdgeOS and run the tunnel in parallel to all the core functionality of the gateway.

A custom property management system for a small real estate business

Built as a Jamstack application, the system is designed to be easily extensible and easy to use. It accommodates common workflows with a highly interactive and powerful UI. Many common processes are automated. Bank accounts are deeply integrated and automatically synchronized with the system via TrueLayer APIs.

Helped improve and digitise internal processes

Worked with stakeholders to further streamline and automate Elanco's infrastructure and application processes. Developed an internal Express.js REST API offering unified visibility into existing and future applications, their characteristics and performance. Additionally developed a powerful React and Tailwind CSS based web interface to query the API. This provided rich reports on applications individually, in groups, by technologies / software stack / internal organisational units etc. Further extended and iterated on the project for it to take over part of the application approval and deployment process entirely.

Converted complex log-like data to a powerful & intuitive dashboard

Designed and developed a dashboard UI for the internal Automation / DevOps framework. Used Express, React.js, Tailwind to convert difficult to trace and navigate log-like data to a user-friendly interactive Web UI. The dashboard presented a holistic overview of past and current automation runs and vastly improved UX by intelligently analysing job and task status and results to surface any issues to the user. Allowed for intuitive interactive traversal and search down the automation hierarchy to simplify troubleshooting.

CMS-powered Jamstack restaurant platform with online ordering and an AI chatbot

Contentful CMS driven restaurant platform built as a Jamstack app. Automated static rebuild and redeploy via GitHub Actions. Backend services provided by Firestore, Firebase Authentication, Stripe, Google Cloud Functions and a custom serverless Chatbot running in Google Cloud Run.

NLP chatbot for ordering online grocery delivery

The bot uses Spacy and Scikit-learn with custom models trained on the Sainsbury's product dataset. The bot helps the user search for and select products for the order and arrange delivery to their address at the chosen timeslot.

Fixed and refactored library for controlling Midea AC over the internet

Refactored and updated multiple upstream libraries to support new cloud communications protocol and correctly interact with new AC models. Figured out the correct implementation via reverse engineering original apps, IR remote codes and based on existing libraries.