Richard Reddy

My current position as Technical Director in Dragnet Systems Limited is a very challenging but rewarding role. I am in charge of ensuring everyone stays up to date with current .net trends and regularly have code camps with my work colleagues.

I am still the lead developer in Dragnet and my duties include building and maintaining database driven web sites and management systems that are used by local and multinational organisations. I specialize in highly optimized and extremely efficient online systems for clients and pride myself on producing the best work on time and within budget.

Since becoming a technical director I have put many new policies into place in Dragnet including:

• Migrated our codebase over to .net 2.0, then 3.5 and currently on 4.0
• Continued to train our developers and designers on best practices for working with .net
• Introduced source control (Mercurial) into the company and trained all staff on using it.
• Moved our developers from WebForms over to MVC 3

My work has been mentioned in the papers including Sunday Times and the Irish Examiner and on numerous blogging sites including Engadget and killerstartups.com.

My role as Lead Developer gave me the opportunity to really step up my development skills. I took on the responsibilities of managing a team of developers and setup training camps for the other developers to not only learn from me but also share their knowledge with me.

During my role as Lead Developer I continued to refactor our classic ASP codebase. Every few months I would introduce new techniques to help speed up the workload for the team by using simple to use code snippets. For example, reading and writing XML, sending template newsletters, dynamic form validation and more.

I started working in Dragnet as a customer support specialist. I dealt with customers on a daily basis and handled all aspects of client support including email support, domain registrations/setup, SSL registration/setups, IIS, etc.

It was a great role and a brilliant way to become familiar with how a web company functioned. I spearheaded numerous internal projects including coding a client management system, introduced proper documentation for all our projects and setup procedure guides for other employees to use.

My role in Boston Scientific was to help with the support for the IT department. This was a great role to be in as it gave me a complete oversight into the running of an efficient IT dept.

It was a very challenging position due to the fact that I had to be able to do everything from installing new PCs onto the network to configuring routers to setting up phone systems.

There was no typical day here. One day I could be giving a training induction to a group of people and the next I could be crimping cables. It was a great opportunity to put into practice everything I had learned after college.

Roles included:

• PC setup and maintenance
• Phone Installation and setup
• Using Applix for job tracking
• training new recruits
• Cisco router configurations