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Darren Newton

Full Stack Software Developer
6 recommendations
  • Suggested rate
    €800 / day
  • Experience8-15 years
  • Response rate100%
  • Response time1 hour
The project will begin once you accept Darren's quote.
Location and workplace preferences
Location
Lincoln, England, United Kingdom
Can work onsite in your office in
  • and around Lincoln (up to 50km)
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1Repos
0Gists
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Skill set
Darren in a few words
I have been in the software industry for over 20 years. From writing the first line of code of our enterprise travel and expense SAAS solution through to being the CTO for over 15 years and part of the management team that directed the business through to a multi-million pound acquisition of that company in 2020.

I am happy to engage in projects using my skills as a full stack developer or my skills as a CTO, or anything in between. I am as passionate about writing code today as I was when I started my career 24 years ago. The majority of my experience is on the .NET platform and my primary language is C#. I have a lot of knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server, building and tuning databases, APIs and enterprise Web Applications.

These are some of the things I can help you with:
-Full end to end project development. Web, mobile, windows applications, APIs or utilities
-Software consulting, code reviews
-Interim CTO, review of software team structure. Tools used, team development etc
-Migration from legacy to modern platforms. Moving server based architecture to the cloud
-DevOps
-Agile training and implementation
-Solution analysis and specification creation
-Product Roadmaps
-Database design, performance tuning
-ISO 27001 implementation
Experience
  • Allocate Software
    Engineering Director
    SOFTWARE PUBLISHING
    October 2020 - September 2021 (12 months)
    London, England, United Kingdom
    As part of the acquisition of Selenity I was employed at Allocate Software as an Engineering Director. Reporting to the Head of Engineering, I retained responsibility suite of Selenity
    products coming into the organisation. My responsibilities included roadmap
    planning, development scheduling, sprint delivery and product deployment.
    Moving into a larger organisation, I was also responsible for helping merge my
    previous department into the new organisation. Adapting Allocate's processes
    where applicable or being an ambassador of why we did things in a certain
    way. Mapping responsibilities to the correct departments in Allocate if they did
    not align with Selenity and ensure a smooth transition.

    A few months into the role I was asked to take overall responsibility for another product “in crisis”. It was a SaaS based product acquired from another organisation. A failed release had resulted in an unusable product which left as was would have resulted in thousands of temporary NHS workers not being paid. The product did not scale well and the working practices throughout the development lifecycle were inadequate.

    Due to my experience and skill set my brief from the Engineering Director and CTO was to “fix it” and I was given one contact to get in touch with. Gaining a new team, I solved the immediate problem of the failed release before getting to understand the working practices, failures in process, software inefficiencies and deployment strategy. I slowly introduced better processes and created a project plan to redeploy the failed release and make the product more stable and scalable. Whilst I was only working on the product for 9 months before I left and did not see the full plan through to completion, I am happy to say I left it in a better place than I found it.
    Agile method SAAS Project Management
  • Selenity Ltd
    Chief Technology Officer
    SOFTWARE PUBLISHING
    January 2005 - September 2020 (15 years and 9 months)
    Lincoln, England, United Kingdom
    As Chief Technology Officer I had overall responsibility for the development and maintenance of our portfolio of Software as a Service applications. This included keeping software compliant, reducing technical debt, building new features and ensuring performance and scalability. Whilst I had overall responsibility for departmental strategy, I was always hands on in helping teams implement our vision and goals.

    My key responsibilities included:

    Responsibility for the product roadmap. Liaising with sales and service teams to ensure a balance of new features and reduction of technical debt. Collating feature requirements, high level planning and more granular planning as work items were ready to be developed.
    Responsibility for production systems. Release upgrades and contractual uptime requirement of 99.99%.
    Support for meetings with prospective clients where a technical presence was required.
    Overall responsibility for ISO 27001 certification in the organisation
    Increasing department productivity by adopting new techniques
    Mentoring junior members of the team
    Assisting in problem solving of technical issues.

    Key achievements included:

    Development of mobile application for our Expense Management solution using Xamarin and later React Native.
    The management of several infrastructure migrations including: Dedicated to cloud, hybrid dedicated/cloud and full cloud on Microsoft Azure.
    Implementation of ISO 27001 and 10 years of successful audits.
    Implementation of full Agile methodology across multiple products and multiple teams.
    Scalability of software from 0 to over 400 customers.
    Rewrite of a bespoke reporting engine from a windows service to a microservice using .NET core Web API. Testing time was reduced from 2 months of manual testing to a fully automated suite of tests that ran in under 20 minutes.
    Transition from a 20 year old monolith architecture written using Microsoft ASP.NET Webforms to a microservice architecture.
    Implementation of a DevOps culture.
    Reduced release period of new versions to production from 1 year to every 2 weeks.
    Introduction and integration of offshore teams in India.
    C# Project Management Agile method
6 recommendations
GS
GS
AS
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Gary Shepherd and 5 other people have recommended Darren

Gary ShepherdGS
Gary Shepherd
Sprint Enterprise Technology Ltd
24/04/2023
I have known and worked with Darren for over 20 years. His knowledge of development procedures and understanding of past and new development techniques is unmatched. He has a fantastic attitude, is a great manager and creates a great rapport with both clients and staff. I would, and do, consider Darren an asset to any business looking to enhance their team with an experienced CTO.
Greg StevensonGS
Greg Stevenson
Private
22/04/2023
I worked directly with Darren for almost 10 years at Selenity. During that time he led the growth of the technical team from a business that was focused on mainframe technology, through to a huge pivot and growth in size as it moved to web and mobile applications in the SaaS world. Darren's approach to technology innovation and his leadership helped me grow to where I am today. He's an expert in his field and I would highly recommend him.
Anthony SherwinAS
Anthony Sherwin
RLDatix
15/04/2023
Darren's a great leader, especially around cloud solutions, ensuring they're scalable, well coded and truly focusing on customer needs whilst balancing the commercial aspects of growing a business through to sale. I've worked with Darren for around 12 years and saw him implement a number of methodologies, create and develop successful solutions for our client base and lead his teams. His work ethics and commitment are rare to find along with his ability to work on pretty much anything the business put his way. He sets the bar high and would highly recommend. 
Kieron SykesKS
Kieron Sykes
Evotix Ltd
12/04/2023
I had the pleasure of working with Darren for almost 8 years at Selenity, during which time he consistently demonstrated exceptional leadership and technical expertise. Darren was instrumental in driving the technical strategy and direction for our SaaS product suite, ensuring that our technology was scalable, secure, and innovative.
Adam BowlerAB
Adam Bowler
Allocate Software
07/04/2023
Darren is a great CTO and mentor, he lead by example and was constantly looking for ways to help the teams achieve our goals.
Neil EverattNE
Neil Everatt
Selenity Limited
05/04/2023
It was a privilege to work with Darren growing our business and successfully exiting in 2020. Darren was a fundamental part of the Board and drove our technology direction that helped create a multi-million pound business. When experiencing the rapid growth of our cloud solutions he navigated our tech strategy to deliver and maintain quality systems with great user experiences. Highly recommended.
Education
  • Bsc It & Computing (hons)
    The Open University
    2002