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Curriculum Vitae

James Andrew Fitzsimons

Personal Information

Marital Status: Married
Residential Status: UK Spousal Visa, New Zealand Citizen
Drivers Licence: Full New Zealand Licence (No demerit points)

Academic Qualifications

Tertiary Education:

Victoria University of Wellington
2000 Conjoint BSc\BCA (Computer Science/Marketing)

Core Competencies:

I have spent the last two years working as a senior developer for Intergen, a leading specialist Microsoft solutions development company. My development responsibilities included a mixture of web-based application development and server-side business systems. In addition to the technical development work, my role at Intergen involved project management and team leadership responsibilities including meeting regularly with clients to discuss requirements analysis.

I have also undertaken a large amount of self development and research work in embedded systems by building research projects using various microcontrollers and programmable logic devices. All firmware for this microcontroller development was programmed in C, and the CPLD development was done in Verilog using Xilinx devices.

Employment History:

April 2002 - Feb 2004    Intergen, Senior Developer

Application Framework.

Government Sector:
This project involved the design and implementation of a framework to aid the delivery of transactional web applications for a government department. The framework comprised of a database, a number of web services, some .NET assemblies that provided an API, and a Content Management Server installation.
The framework was designed so that applications could be developed individually and in a modular way, and plugged into the framework to become part of the all encompassing site. The framework provided many services including authentication and authorisation, custom session management, shopping cart facilities, credit card processing, order creation and processing, and integration into legacy systems.

Microsoft - Event Planner for PocketPC

Private Sector:
I was the sole developer for this piece of work for Microsoft. The project involved building a Smart Client application for Mobile Devices running the Pocket PC operating system. The application was built to demonstrate the possibilities of the .NET Compact Framework and was distributed to attendees at the 2003 Microsoft TechEd conference.

Medical Assurance Society - BizTalk implementation and web site development.

Insurance Sector:
I was the lead developer for this application development. It involved developing an online insurance claims system utilizing an ASP.NET web interface integrating with a SQL Server 2000 and BizTalk 2002 backend. BizTalk was used for business orchestration, and for integration with a number of legacy systems.

NZDF - Interface development

Private Sector:
I was the lead developer on this project. This involved building a number of interfaces using BizTalk (primarily as a message exchange) to enable electronic ordering and reconciliation by NZDF's customers. BizTalk was used as a gateway to NZDF's JDE ERP system.

Meridian Energy - web application

Private Sector:
I was a developer and the DBA for this project. The technologies used were ASP.NET web forms written in C#, with an Oracle 8i database backend. This project had a very rich interface requirement and involved some complex web development.

Jan 2000 - April 2002    Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Senior Consultant

Java Development and Oracle Portal Implementation.

Electricity Market:
This project involved the requirements analysis for a portal solution for a data management company in the New Zealand electricity market. My role on the project consisted of business analysis in the inception and elaboration phases, mainly around the design of the various portlets. I had the lead Java development role in building of the portlets, and a systems administration role in the development and role out of the Oracle solution. As the project team was quite small, I also carried out some project management responsibilities.

Java Development and Infrastructure management.

Electricity Market provider:
This was an extremely large scale project based out of the Cap Gemini Ernst & Young's Chicago Advanced Development Center. I had two major roles on this project, firstly as a Java developer, and later as an infrastructure administrator. The Java development role involved designing and developing the application layer of the solution using JSP for presentation and Java web beans to hold business logic with JDBC calls to an Oracle 8i database. The infrastructure administration role entailed networking and Compaq infrastructure management, hardware testing and bench marking, Oracle DBA responsibilities, and NT security and administration.

UNIX and Oracle 11i implementation

NZSTA: New Zealand Schools Trustees Association
This involved implementing iProcurement - self-service purchasing and five modules of Oracle Applications Release 11i across 3-tier architecture. I was responsible for delivering technical architecture components (systems administration, database administration, server configuration, Solaris Administration, Firewall configuration, security etc), performance tuning of database and application software, backup and recovery plan, capacity planning, Oracle Applications Implementation/DBA and System Administrator training of client.

Intranet Development

Private Sector:
This project involved the development of a generic Intranet solution using a component model. The Intranet was developed using Active Server Pages, Visual Basic to build COM objects, MSSQL Server, Microsoft Transaction Server, Internet Information Server, and Windows NT 4.0 Server. I was actively involved in all aspects and stages of this development.

Personal Development:

Over the last three years I have developed a personal interest in embedded development and robotics. I have, through my various projects, taught myself about electronic design principals, digital electronics, and embedded program development.

My robotics projects primarily involve interfacing micro-controllers to various sensor systems to enable behaviours to be developed.
I have used Parallax Basic Stamp, MicroChip PIC, and Motorola 68332 micro-controllers in my projects. The firmware has been developed in BASIC, C, and Assembler. I have interfaced these micro-controllers to a large assortment of sensors and periperials such as Infra-red detectors, switches, LED's and LCD displays, motors, memory devices, CCD cameras and graphical displays. As the projects I have undertaken recently have been quite complex I have used a project plan approach, breaking the project down by significant milestones so that I can measure my progress.

My most recent challenge has been to integrate grid based navigation and planning software with closed loop motor control system for my current robot platform. This system is based around a Motorola 68332 micro-controller. All software was written in ANSI C using the GNU gcc compiler. This project required me to learn about and write code for a number of different modules. They were:

I have also built a simple object tracking system using a CCD camera and Motorola 68332 micro-controller. This system can lock onto and track objects on a pan and tilt arrangement. I intend to extend on this work to implement basic object recognition, however doing some intial research I realise that this will require a much more sophisticated development system.

Embedded development is an area of technology I find particularly interesting and rewarding. I see embedded devices playing an increasingly important role in our everyday life, and for these reasons I hope to pursue a career in this field.

Interests and other activities: