Robin Stemp

Passionate and Creative Software Architect

Mid to late 1980’s

  • Atari 800XL (64 kb Ram) - Cartridge based system with ROM for Atari Basic, had a similar interface to C64 (Commodore 64)
  • Commodore Amiga 500 - 512kb Ram, 3.5” Floppy Disks… Had a pre-emptive multitasking OS (unique for the time)
    • Had hundreds, if not thousands of games on 3.5” disks, several drawers full
    • xcopy was popular to copy copy-protected disks, (bad sectors and the like), often worked, sometimes didnt
    • Wrote hex file editor in AmigaBasic (Microsoft Product) to adjust save game files to change things like health, money, items, inventory (in RPG’s etc) for multiple games with GUI editor to simplify user input.
    • Wrote some games in AMOS - A BASIC environment for creating games, with sprites and sound files.
    • MOD editors for sound effects and tunes
    • Did Motorola 68k assembler…. many amiga demos from cracking groups were in assembly showing off the cool visual capabilities of the Amiga
    • Had an OS called Workbench (from 1.2, to 1.3, than 2.0) which was a unix-like OS with a unique GUI interface.
    • large community groups, local and with BBS
    • CPU was around 7mhz, with custom chips agnes, denise (can’t remember exactly)

Early-Mid 90’s

  • Brought a 386DX-40
  • learnt 8086 assembler, built some DOS apps
  • Had a 56k modem
  • connected to usenet forums
  • Helped run a Searchlight BBS in Wgtn, NZ
  • gw-basic, qbasic - wrote snake variants
  • learnt c, turbo c, turbo pascal - wrote various apps for DOS.
  • used MS-DOS, DR-DOS, QEMU and learnt about command line
  • used Windows 3.1
  • used OS/2
  • used Windows 95

2000-2003

  • in 2000 for completing an html course (I think it was southen solutions Hurstville NSW Australia), presented a project to the NSW education minister at the time John Aquilina on how websites can help the education sector
  • Learnt HTML, CSS, Javascript
  • Learnt perl cgi-bin
  • Learnt PHP, MySql, and Apache config and setup
  • simple GET and POST concepts with requests
  • experimented and implemented PhpNuke, Xoops, Mambo (later became Joomla) and other PHP CMS
  • created various website(s)
  • windows 98/98SE, Windows Server 2000
  • experiemented with various linux distros, “beos” was a notable one

2004

  • Did course for Web design cert, and diploma web development at TAFE Padstow NSW
  • Photoshop
  • Illustrator
  • LAMP Stack (Linux Apache Mysql Php)
  • XAMP, WAMP
  • New browser Firefox releasing.
  • Started getting more freelance work for PHP/MySql

2005

  • Did small business cert
  • started new sole-trader busines with name Websolving
  • Started learning C# with Murach C# 2005 and other materials, along with Sql Server and ASP.NET books
  • More freelance work PHP/Mysql based.
  • experimented with all things ‘.NET`

2006

SydneyWeb

  • Started at a Web Agency in Sydney CBD, “SydneyWeb” as a programmer (PHP/MySql). Than became consultant for new client projects, discussing requirements, creating estimates, technical documentation, than technical architecture documents for outsourced developers.
  • Quite a few projects were to replace implementations by other companies that didnt work properly, or had terrible user interfaces.
  • Implemented Drupal Cms leading another developer.
  • Created custom CMS from scratch.
  • started on a VB6 winforms project.. third party application COM+ component did not work with .NET 2.0 at the time (kept crashing), so VB6 was the only option.
  • did some C# .NET projects
  • experimented with Modx, Joomla (prev mambo) CMS
  • worked with various web tech, SOAP services, and the like.
  • created desktop media scheduler, with freelance maintenance over a 4 year period.
  • php templating with smarty
  • codeigniter cms

2007 - 2008

Tequila Digital

  • Started at a mid-size Web Agency in Pyrmont, Sydney, “Tequila Digital” as a sole .NET developer, other devs were PHP/MySql. Created tech specifications, architected and developed several web applications.
  • investigated a custom-built solution for a high-profile news company that was not designed properly, and recommended a replacement using Umbraco cms. 4 weeks with Umbraco acheived 80% of what prev took 7 months.

Amnesia Razorfish

  • Started at “Amnesia Razorfish” web agency in Sydney, award winning agency, was the first to get Microsoft Surface, and Microsoft brought them out.
  • Visited Microsoft office in North Ryde to watch the energetic Steve Balmer really show massive support for developers.
  • worked on a campaign for NineMSN FriendMagnet. A .NET / html/js/flash based game for messenger users, had to support 300,000 simultaneous messenger users playing.
  • consulted with external nueroscientists to estimate, and architect a brain training by games portal. Created architecture design, and wireframe mockups with Axure RP. Implemented with ASP.NET 3.0.
  • Learnt about concepts about how learning can be accelerated.
  • implemented NHibernate as a DAL layer
  • used log4net as a logging layer, later used nlog
  • ASP.NET MVC was very new on the 1.0 version, so used http handlers and traditional web forms.
  • Viewstate was an issue
  • we implemented AGILE practices, XP, realized was already doing similar without the actual terminology.

Learning

  • read Pro ASP.NET 3.0, Pro LINQ with .NET 3.0, and another couple of Pro books. learnt about linq to data, linq to xml, and linq to sql.
  • created a modx tool modbak to backup modx based files and database into single zip file, making it simple to export an entire modx cms based website.
  • learning about jquery and how easy it made DOM querying and manipulation, along with ajax

2009 - 2011

Moved from Sydney to Gold Coast, Australia

  • started using mercurial distributed source control
  • setup bitbucket accounts
  • did some php/mysql dev for a small stockbroker marketing company in gold coast.
  • in spare time, created a .NET winforms app to scrape contact details from web pages, yellow pages and white pages initially. offered a fair chunk of money by a company to buy it, though I didnt want to get involved with the legalities of it, so declined as the company was a competitor.
  • worked for a small Php/Mysql based company doing occasional website modifications, and created a Kohana based scheduler with web frontend, and some payment gateway interfaces for ModX cms
  • started learnig about nodejs

Mantra

  • using DotNetNuke (ASP.NET) CMS to manage, and implement new features on a range of Mantra’s hotel websites
  • cufon, sifr for stylish fonts for web viewing, prior to uptake of web fonts
  • jquery for frontend javascript dom layers.
  • jquery template engine for handling html based templates

2012

Cash Doctors

  • linq to ef with CashDoctors, WPF,
  • ASP.NET mvc with creating a real-time calculator for quoting.

iaAnyware

  • Started at iaAnyware as the sole Web Developer to create a web based insurance quoting wizard for U.S market. Created from scratch a quoting wizard with ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework using .NET Framework 4.0. using an html theme called developr for first iteration.. This was not using any SPA at this stage. 6 month contract.
  • for logging used nlog, views were razor
  • created the frontend which consisted of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jquery using the base developr template.
  • more intensive learning about Entity Framework and ASP.NET MVC
  • attempt to demonstrate benefits of Continuos Integration amd Continuos Delivery

2013-2015

  • After demonstrating how a web based solution can be built, and run efficiently, and maintained using new development practices (essentially clean coding, separation of concerns). My contract got renewed.
  • started creating prototyping for new direction of web suite of products.
  • created build and deployment scripts with MSBuild
  • changed developr template to new metronic template.
  • setting up new build virtual machines for ASP.NET web applications, along with deployment processes
  • learning about angularjs 1.0
  • setting up I.I.S on virtual machines
  • learning about Azure cloud services
  • learning about async/await patterns in .NET, and implementing
  • learning about MongoDb and NoSql, and implementing
  • learning about the new .NET Core framework, rearchitecture in its early stages.
  • implemented Git repositories, setup new company bitbucket repositories and default permissions
  • created repository structures across different solutions and projects
  • learnt and implemented nuget packaging processes, wrote command line scripts to simplify processes.
  • started pairing with other developers to show how to implement web solutions. from ASP.NET to css, and javascript.

……. [more to come]