Alister Bulman
Lead Developer/Sysadmin at Contract Availability
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London, United Kingdom
- top 1% php
- top 5% database
- top 10% asynchronous
- php
- linux
- phpunit
- redis
- symfony
Started a role at Wi-Q Limited
Oct 2020
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Ongoing
Senior Backend PHP/Symfony developer at Wi-Q Limited
Writing API endpoints & systems with PHP 7.x/8.x+/Symfony 3.4-5.4 (and API-Platform) and message-queue consumers for the public site & back-end systems (for internal and client/organisation use), scattered around various largely independent micro-services.Wi-Q is a hosted SaaS for browser-based ordering of food & beverages for individual stores, entertainment venues and hotels to large continent-spanning organisations with potentially hundreds of locations.Sample Projects:API This allows far larger amounts of work to happen (eg, large data-exports) without trying to wait for results, which can time out.
- Endpoints for user addresses - creating, updating, listing and setting single preferred locations
- Deleting (test) data based on date-ranges
- Exporting data to CSV & PDFs
- Creating/improving test fixtures for local development
- Leading development on background jobs, often as a layer on top of existing services.
- Reports on a Daily/weekly/monthly, and custom-periods, generated with multiple levels of detail (per venue, or multiple within an organisation), and output as stored & emailed PDFs. Particularly interesting was the time-zone calculations of the start of a day (for reporting purposes), as the venues could be anywhere in the world, and offset the 'day start time' for business reasons.
- Notifications, based on existing messages already being generated (through RabbitMQ) about the status of an order - if a venue wishes to send an SMS notification when ready for collection, the system can send a customised message via a Twilio integration, and other more specialised services.
- Testing with PHPUnit & Behat.
- Code reviewing, assisting junior developers & Symfony newcomers.
- Improving code quality with static analysis (PHPStan, & PHPStorm inspections), upgrading from older versions of Symfony framework & PHP - manually (for example improving and refactoring controllers and services to Symfony 4+ style dependency injection) & also with tools such as RectorPHP.
- Writing custom PHPStan rule(s) to find specific issues within a codebase.
- Building and improving Docker configs & CI systems (such as enabling basic code-coverage from Behat tests)
- Working entirely remotely, with ticketing system & Slack (and now PHPStorm Code-With-Me!)
- php
- symfony
- linux
- mysql
- phpunit
- behat
- docker
- phpstan
Contributed code
Feb 2020
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Ongoing
JS & WebPack site (with PHP to fetch/parse underlying data)
- webpack
- javascript
- php
- symfony-console
Contributed code
Oct 2015
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Ongoing
Create a public resource of companies that use PHP in London
Contributed code
Jul 2012
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Ongoing
presentation July 16 2012On July 16th 2012, I presented this second set of slides on Queuing.https://alister.github.io/presentations/QueueGoodBad/
- s5
- html
- beanstalkd
Contributed code
Mar 2012
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Ongoing
config files for zsh, bash, completions, gem, git, etcConfigurations of user login and the 'dotfiles'.
- perl
Studying
Jan 2012
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Ongoing
CS169.1x and .2x Software Engineering online course, EdX/BerkeleyX
CS169.1x (and 2x) teaches the fundamentals for engineering long-lasting software using highly-productive Agile techniques to develop Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails.
- ruby-on-rails
- software-engineering
- cucumber
- rspec
- unit-testing
Getting certified
Jan 2009
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Ongoing
Zend, PHP5 (ZCE).
- php5
Shared a post
Deployment with Capistrano – the Gotchas — PHP Scaling
Capistrano, makes deployment of code easy. If you need to do a number of additional steps as well, then the fact that they can be scripted and run automatically is a…
Shared a post
Doing the work elsewhere – Asynchronous Message Queues — PHP Scaling
The use of Beanstalkd as a queueing system.
Shared a post
BeanstalkD: An Introduction to queuing — Presentation on Job Queues and BeanstalkD
Scaling PHP-based systems, with related technologies. The first in a number of posts about queues, and Beanstalkd.
Background
Background
I’ve been programming since 1981 at school, with machines/languages as diverse as ZX81 Basic, Z80a assembler, BBC Basic/6502, Pascal (MS & Turbo), C (learnt from the original K\&R book) and some Perl. I’ve been programming – and getting paid for it – since 1987 in companies that did everything from BIOSes to county-wide library systems. In 1996, I started developing websites, and it was a natural move as a programmer to move into some Perl and mostly PHP (then still at version 3) for more complex, database backed websites.
Had a role at ClassCentral
Nov 2019
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Jan 2020
Devops/Senior developer at ClassCentral
Fully remote contract, assisting the move from expensive dedicated hosting, to a largely automated Ansible server configuration & deployment.I also assisted the existing developer on the initial migrations & improvements to use newer-style Symfony configs for upgrading from v3.4, via new features & code reviews.
In April 2020, Class Central received more traffic than in [the whole of] 2019. These users were also more engaged. - https://twitter.com/dhawalhshah/status/1252226014559772674
- php
- ansible
- google-cloud-platform
- linux
- symfony
Graduated
Dec 2019
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Dec 2019
Getting Started with Go, University of California, Irvine on Coursera
Taught by: Ian Harris, University of California, IrvineLearn the basics of Go, an open source programming language originally developed by a team at Google and enhanced by many contributors from the open source community.This course is designed for individuals with previous programming experience using such languages as C, Python, or Java, and covers the fundamental elements of Go. Topics include data types, protocols, & formats.
- go
Had a role at Partnerize
Jun 2019
·
Oct 2019
Senior PHP/Symfony developer at Partnerize
Tasked to build a new, modern, Symfony 4+ base for the existing site, and service API, driven as a middleware layer between multiple existing and new services and data-warehouse systems.
- symfony4
- php
- docker
Had a role at Contract Availability
Jan 2015
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Sep 2019
Lead Developer/Sysadmin at Contract Availability
In 2015-17 I mostly worked on my own projects, primarily https://www.contractavailability.com/ This was a lot of back-end PHP, in Symfony 2 (2.3, now upgraded to 4.1+) and the front-end pipeline, including some basic use NodeJS and Gulp to build the assets for dev & prod. (Now upgraded to Webpack, via symfony/Encore)As part of my work towards the site, I've also integrated external services to aid in marketing, such as session recording, sending notifications of important events to Slack (via Webhooks), and tagging users/actions for advanced email marketing.The machine(s) are also entirely configured using Ansible to ensure consistency and repeat-ability.
- javascript
- css
- ansible
- linux
- symfony
Shared a post
Dec 2018
Investigating RedisGraph – PHP Scaling
The ‘kjdev/redis-graph’ package is the first example of an interface library to RedisGraph – an extension module to Redis that became possible with Redis 4.0’s release. Other modules now include Bloom filters, rate-limiting and a JSON type.
- redis
- graphdb
Had a role at So-Sure
Jul 2018
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Sep 2018
Senior Backend PHP/Symfony developer at So-Sure
- API & Oauth integration with Starling Bank,
- Extensive code quality improvements and refactoring to better prepare for business expansion
- Speeding up the test runtime from ~22mins to ~12mins.
- php
- symfony
- mongodb
Shared a post
Sep 2018
Speeding up your tests, and also your code coverage! – PHP Scaling
Slow running tests are a bug – they stop you from doing as much as you can with your code, & its quality. Spend a little time working on making your tests better, clearer, and faster – and you’ll reap rewards from your work.
- php
- phpunit
- xdebug-profiler
- xdebug
Had a role at MyBuilder
Jan 2018
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Jun 2018
PHP Developer at MyBuilder
Writing functionality and APIs for the main site & back-end admin dashboards to help users, and employees, on a day-to-day basis.As some examples, I took the next/prev paging on the competition listing pages from taking over 0.25/sec per page with a complex database query to a tiny fraction of that, using a materialised view.To help avoid issues with incorrect emails being added, I suggested, and implemented some simple in-page validation and replacement (for example - suggesting '@gmail.com' instead of '@gmal.com') - saving potentially dozens of unusable accounts from being created per day.
- php
- symfony
- postgresql
Had a role at Public Health England
Oct 2016
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Nov 2016
Senior Developer (Contract) at Public Health England
Creating the back-end of a small, but highly dynamic application to allow risk calculations for number, and frequency of alcohol intake according to the latest studies. In late November 2016, it was widely advertised by Public Heath England to gather data, and it had had nearly 43,000 users. The results were widely publicised in the run up to Xmas 2016.Importantly, it had to be able to be used as a stand-alone website, and also within an i-frame Written in Symfony3 and hosted on AWS.alcohol.nhs.uk on archive.org -https://web.archive.org/web/20170722093708/http://alcohol.nhs.uk/
- symfony
- ansible
Had a role at Carphone Warehouse
Apr 2016
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Aug 2016
Senior developer at Carphone Warehouse
Senior developer bringing an external API in-house. I specified the required infrastructure and wrote Ansible manifests to bring the supplied servers to an appropriate condition for the test and production environments. Deploying software with Capistrano.I also setup the initial development machines to support the use of PHP7 using Vagrant and Docker and configured the environment to allow for unit and integration testing.
- php-7
- ansible
- symfony2
- vagrant
- docker
Had a role at HM Passport Office, London
Feb 2014
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Dec 2014
Contract Symfony2 developer at HM Passport Office, London
Bringing the Reporting of Lost or Stolen passports online, and into the digital age as part of the GOV.UK platform.In order to work within the Home Office as a developer, I was checked and received SC Clearance (good till June 2021).As first developer on the beta-project (which went live at the URL loststolenpassport.service.gov.uk in mid-December 2014), I setup the initial Symfony v2.3-based structure, with a facility for local testing with PHPUnit and feature-testing with Behat, and then, using various bundles and best-practices, arranged the multi-page forms, back-end user permissions, and database entities which formed the core of the service.The use of (internal) Symfony services, enabled high-quality testing to be performed on large parts of the code-base, including complex time calculations while avoiding the need to use such things as slow database interactions during testing.Working with a front-end-oriented developer, we added additional (occasionally conditional) forms for all relevant information required in the front-end (by people that had lost their passport - as well as the workflow to be used by passport office staff. The code and UI was iterated on in approximately two-week scrum cycles according to regularly changing requirements and the results of some excellent user research feedback from both civil service staff and the general public.Later, a full suite of internal stats was generated, based on admin actions that allowed for complex quality-of-service verification. The system, also allowed for multiple attempts to reach the reporter including status updates by both email and SMS updates.
- symfony
- lamp
- apache
- php
Had a role at The Book Depository
Mar 2013
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Aug 2013
Contract PHP Developer at The Book Depository
Back-end PHP development of new systems for Symfony2/CLI-based SQS-driven tasks for webscraping data from public sites.Built the ZF1-based PHP Api for a new search system, interfacing between the current site search and a backend Sphinx search engine.Designed and implemented a new coupon-code system, to allow for longer codes, and tens of millions to be pre-generated.All systems had extensive PHPunit test coverage.
- php
- phpunit
- zend-framework
Had a role at LetsJoin
May 2012
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Aug 2012
Lead Devops/PHP developer at LetsJoin
Lets Join are putting Wifi & 3G-enabled webservers onto London Buses. Updating the server, and website on it, is not so easy as a datacentre-based server while the machines are travelling along the roads of central London....I built the alpha version of the website, and wrote the main library to connect with the 3rd party platform (XML interrogation of a SOAP interface) then moved into an lead-dev and Ops role, designing the technical architecture to allow for a number background processes to be run and files to be properly placed for multiple live (bus-mounted) servers to pull the server configuration, website, and data, as well as helping to hire and manage two further PHP developer contractors.I wrote the Puppet manifests for bring up all new machines (core website, development VMs and remote webservers - that usually live on London double-decker buses), and recommended and installed various other tools and systems to be used.There was also further planning on how to keep hundreds of such remote units up to date with website updates as often as every 5 minutes, or more.
- php
- zend-framework
- virtualbox
- linux
- puppet
Contributed code
Jul 2012
·
Jul 2012
a few example PHP scripts, using pda/Pheanstalk and Beanstalkd
- php
Presentation
Jul 2012
Talk on "The Good And Bad Of Queuing"
On Jul 16th 2012, I presented at London Scalability Group on the topic of "The Good And Bad Of Queuing" with the following slides.Presentation repo source on Github
- beanstalkd
Worked on an app
Jun 2012
Find Contractors that want you to contact them
Contractors, Tell recruiters ... exactly when you are available - and tell them when you're notRecruiters, Find the right people, fast Don't spend it asking if contractors are lookingLead dev and owner, till the project was shut down in 2019.
- php
- ansible
- symfony
Had a role at Transform & Government Digital Service & Office of the Public Guardian
Feb 2012
·
Mar 2012
Contracting as one of just two developers responsible for a 6-week prototype site, putting a 40+ page paper-based form online as a proof of concept to ease the production for the creation of a Lasting Power of Attorney.Working with the Government Digital Server (responsible for http://www.gov.uk/) I added support to their systems for the use of PHP to their development stack (in the existing Puppet manifests). This also included the use of Selenium (IDE/browser-addon) to script and test the main web form.
- php
- linux
- zend-framework
- mongodb
- puppet
Had a role at PeerIndex.net
Feb 2011
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Nov 2011
Platform Engineer/Developer at PeerIndex.net
Retrieving data from all over the social web by API access and web-scraping to build individual's social network and calculate their measure of authority within peer-groups, and beyond. See http://www.peerindex.net/alister_b for an example.Some special responsibility for scaling background processes with queues (both AWS/SQS and BeanstalkD), running millions of jobs through the queues every day, and getting the best from an Amazon Web Services / MongoDB environment.I worked with developers around Europe, generally working from home.
- php5
- mongodb
- amazon-ec2
- beanstalkd
- amazon-sqs
- zend-framework
- scaling
Achievement
Jan 2011
Had a role at Bin Weevils Limited
Dec 2009
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Jan 2011
Senior PHP Developer at Bin Weevils Limited
With special responsibilities for scaling and optimisation. Bin Weevils is a flash-based game/social-network/MMORPG for 7-13 year olds in conjunction with the Nickelodeon UK TV channel. There are often 10,000+ concurrent users online. The initial intent was to scale up from an initial ~4000 concurrent players.My skills with Mysql and PHP scaling technologies achieved that through 2010 with improved Apache, Mysql and PHP layers of the stack and other improvements such as use of Memcached for both cache and transient storage.From the servers that I controlled, there was in excess of 200 million hits per month (99.9% PHP, over 20 Million hits/day), from a pair of PHP application servers and with 20+TB data delivered across the entire site per month, including fully dynamic PHP responses to Flash, CDN sourced flash/images & streaming video.I took the site, that had crashed hard under load (when it was being advertised on Nickelodeon a few months before I had arrived) and optimised the infrastructure and the code - adding a lot of new functionality and improving the structure as I went.By Spring, I had brought the entire code-base and site, under version control, and arranged for automated deployments. When there was more than one server to deploy, I added Capistrano. It also then was advertised on TV (and this time, multiple channels, sometimes at the same time) - and this time, it /stayed/ up.Over the summer, even more functionality to go along with a big visual refresh - and 'abusing Memcached for fun and profit', which also saved a lot of traffic from having to touch the database. It saved our necks to hold the sessions within the first hour of a big new release.By late autumn, I'd rolled out a new set of servers for the American market (using the then-new hosted Chef configuration management system), something I would use for all new machines for the main site - and all the while the live-user-counts grew.The first day we released video on the website - downsized for the web from full broadcast-quality sources, we did a Terabyte of video streaming.In the run up to Xmas day, we'd regularly do over 20MM hits/day just on the fully-dynamic PHP API layer (hundreds of millions of requests a week onto the CDN-hosted flash files and images), and ten thousand concurrent players. Not users that had signed up - these were online, playing across 6 or 8 copies of the world, and all being handled by just two PHP application servers.
- php
- mysql
- cdn
- optimization
Worked on an app
Dec 2010
Bin Weevils - Kids Online Virtual World
Bin Weevils is a kids online virtual world where you can create your very own virtual pet, play free online games, chat to friends, grow your own garden and watch great cartoons.Through 2010, I was the lead PHP developer and sysadmin. Adding new functionality, and cleaning up the codebase while allowing ever more users to be playing. During the autumn, the site was also advertised on numerous TV Channels producing some huge spikes of incoming users. Buy the end of the year I had automated the system deployment (with Chef) to allow most new servers to be deployed and be running in as little as 20 minutes.
- php
- zend-framework
- apache
- nginx
- scaling
Presentation at php london
May 2010
PHP London talk on the topic of “Job Queues and Beanstalkd”
On May 6th 2010, I presented at PHP London on the topic of "Job Queues and Beanstalkd" with the following slides: "Beanstalkd: An Introduction".Presentation repo source on Github
- php
- beanstalkd
- message-queue
Achievement
Oct 2009
PHP asynchronous processing with beanstalkd. Do you recommend it?
Achievement
Jun 2009
Had a role at Online Technical Support Ltd
Feb 2007
·
May 2009
Lead PHP Developer at Online Technical Support Ltd
- Working from home 19+ days a month for 2¼ years working a dating website.
- Rewrote back-end administration system in Zend Framework with AJAX support to allow easy site administration (profile approval) and site statistics (turnover, members online, etc)
- Averaged 73+ million hits per month in the 12 months to May 2009, 51M hits to Apache/PHP, 22M to a separate image server
- Scaled site from 75,000 users to 300,000 in 2 years and 75 concurrent users online to 400+ while simultaneously reducing server loads using such techniques as caching of data to memory (APC) & MemcacheD
- Implemented an queue-based system for further scaling (BeanstalkD)
- All new front-end functionality was written in Zend Framework (with JS/jQuery)
- php5
- mysql
- apache
- smarty
- linux
- xmppjabber
Achievement
Apr 2009
Achievement
Mar 2009
Had a role at American Mobile Ventures
Jan 2005
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Jan 2007
Senior PHP Developer at American Mobile Ventures
- Putting in place a development environment to scale from an initial two developers to a total of nine.
- Installing and maintaining multiple local and remote web servers and MySQL servers with replication to two slaves
- Planning new version of the SMS sending/receipts engine to be able to scale to orders of magnitude greater throughput on multiple servers as part of a cluster
- linux
- php
- mysql
Had a role at Technotheurgic Ltd T/A Intunet
Jun 2004
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Sep 2005
PHP Developer at Technotheurgic Ltd T/A Intunet
- Extensive use and development of common tool kits for site frameworks and email templates
- PEAR and Smarty-based PHP website applications, including multi-lingual sites
- Installation of bug-tracking and version control systems System administration of local dev environments & remote, live webservers that the websites ran on.
- mysql
- php
- smarty
Had a role at Datasouth UK Ltd
Jan 2003
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May 2004
Senior PHP Developer / System Administrator at Datasouth UK Ltd
- Supported the production team on advanced PHP use (PHP/Development/Linux local 'Guru')
- Maintaining and upgrading multiple internal and external RHEL servers
- Installation of dedicated image server for BTOpenworld HTML-based email images which reached a peak of over 170 connections per second and 3.3 million hits/day in February 2004
- Email tracking system, which generated unique URLs for links and a 'web-bug' image to count readers/click-throughs
- Simple link count/redirection system (used by BT Openworld in various email and paper mailings before & after their transition to Yahoo Mail)
- Design and development of HTML/MIME personalised bulk email sending system to integrate with the email tracking system to send in excess of 270,000 emails on behalf of BTClick.com
- Installed CVS-based development environment Maintenance and extension of the in-house content administration system
- Server control and information systems to support a DNS system with a web-based control panel.
- linux
- php
- mysql
- dns
- apache
- thttpd
- version-control
- djb-dns
Had a role at Falcon Internet Marketing
Nov 1999
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Dec 2002
Web/PHP Developer at Falcon Internet Marketing
FIM is a Web-marketer. I initially joined as a freelance web developer, based at home, and telecommuting as needed. Later, I was taken on full time, though still home-based.Initially they were fairly plain HTML-sites, occasionally generated from templates (such as HTMLpp, see https://web.archive.org/web/20160312045931/http://legacy.imatix.com/html/htmlpp/index5.htm Later, more complex sites were database backed, using PHP v3 & MySQL v3.5.2+.
- html
- php
- linux
- perl
Graduated
Jan 1991
·
Jan 1992
HNC Computer Studies, Bournemouth University
HNC Computer Studies, 1992
- software-development
- system-architecture