Freelance

API simulation solutions used by our global clients to enable local development of distributed systems. Decoupling team schedules with API first methodology. Including HTTP, gRPC, IBM MQ, and RabbitMQ.

Co-Founder

Heavy emphasis on eXtreme Programming and Agile methodologies including Kanban and daily Pair Programming.  Acquired by Comcast Corporation in 2018.

Senior Agile Developer

Treasure Hunt and GeoLotto web based games. Acquired by Zeal Network SE in 2016.

Full Stack Developer

Created the backend for a bespoke conference calling messaging app for use by the incident response team, integrated with their VoIP conference calling system using Asterisk. First introduction to Scala.

Internship

Created mathematics questions for use on the educational gaming platform Mangahigh.

Author

Java, TDD and automation expert with 15+ years experience

Liam Williams

Working with technical authors, reviewing coding article drafts, and providing helpful feedback. Acting as a quality gate to ensure a high standard of published content.

Technical Editor

Helping development teams to deliver faster and with fewer bugs. 90-minute
workshops for teams that are new to TDD and unit testing, or want to further hone their skills.

TDD Code Kata Workshops

Core product providing API mocking and service virtualization capabilities. For use in local development, CI/CD, cloud and shared environments. Shift left testing solution. Used by multiple enterprise customers and hundreds of developers every day.

API and Service Simulator

Point of contact for multiple customer accounts, making sure that they are able to achieve their business goals using our technology.


Customer Success

Product documentation, release notes, blog posts, tutorials.

Technical Documentation

Ongoing setup and maintenance of CI/CD and cloud resources.

System Administration

Making data-informed business decisions using statistical analysis and forecasting techniques.

Data Analytics

Helped to write a series of articles about the options available for testing microservices, published on the InfoQ website and in the InfoQ eMag:
1. An Overview of 12 Useful Techniques
2. Examining the Tradeoffs of Twelve Techniques
3. Six Case Studies with a Combination of Testing Techniques

InfoQ Testing Microservices Article Series

Built a secure license server for counting license usage, compatible with modern cloud environments such as OpenShift. In use by all of our customers, both on-premise and cloud-based.

License Server

Helped to build a tool to analyse a customer’s current configuration, to assist in creating a migration plan to move to our tool.

Migration Analysis Tool

Internal tool to provide Slack noti cations in response to key customer events. Used
daily by our team to improve response times and quality of customer interactions.

Slack Notification Tool

Maintenance of an existing core product used in the broadband customer preprovisioning process to determine broadband product availability. Assisted in architectural migration decisions to split up a bulky app into distinct microservices. The main tech stack was Java, Oracle, Linux, and Tomcat. Sky Broadband has over 6 million active customers.

Product Availability Checker

Helped to upskill Junior Developers on the team with daily pair programming. Explored exercises in various programming languages and frameworks.

Pair Programming Mentor

Highly available microservice architecture built with Docker and Kubernetes. Integrated with other internal microservices and external third parties, including Syniverse, the main UK number porting provider. SFTP batch  le processing. Took a Domain Driven Design approach with CQRS and Event Sourcing as key driving principles for the system architecture. Sky Mobile has successfully onboarded over 3 million customers.

Mobile Number Porting

Fibre to the Premises availability checker microservice. Stateless middleware,
consuming and producing HTTP JSON REST APIs.

FTTP Availability Checker

Took on the role of internal Java expert and helped push a departmental Java 8 rollout.

Java Component Owner

Designed and built an IT system for ICS Cleaning Services, London City Airport to manage their stock inventory, developed using Microsoft Access and Visual Basic.

Stock Inventory System

Created homebrew game demos for the PlayStation 2 games console in Yabasic.

PS2 Yabasic Demos

Created homebrew game demos for the ZX Spectrum.

ZX Spectrum Demos

Created homebrew game demos for the Nintendo DS in C/C++.

Nintendo DS Demos

This advanced undergraduate programming course covers the principles of functional programming using Scala, including the use of functions as values, recursion, immutability, pattern matching, higher-order functions and collections, and lazy evaluation. Grade Achieved: 100% with Distinction.

Coursera - Functional Programming Principles in Scala

This course is a novice-friendly introduction to computer science and programming Android apps for smartphones and tablets. In it, students use the programming tools that Android software developers use and build a complete and useful app during this course. Grade Achieved: 100%.

Coursera - Creative, Serious and Playful Science of Android Apps

Proficiency in the usage of data structures including arrays, hash tables, linked lists, trees, heaps, and graphs, as well as object-oriented design principles, Java threads, streams, retrieval, and update algorithms.

Upwork Skill Certification - Java Backend Development

Learning projects with physical electronic components.

Arduino and Raspberry Pi

Awarded for the best JMC/Computing final year project.
In my final year project, I used various AI and ML techniques to build a model to predict the outcome of tennis matches using the implied advice of internet tipsters. The model achieved a 2.16% historical return on investment.

Donald Davies Memorial Prize

Graduated with a 1st class honours degree.

Year 1: Architecture, Logic and Reasoning about Programs, Programming and Data Structures, Computation, Analysis I, Algebra I, Analytical Methods and Analysis, Geometry and Linear Algebra.

Year 2: Software Engineering - Algorithms, Operating Systems, Software Engineering - Design I, Concurrency, Introduction to Arti cial Intelligence, Laboratory, Algebra II, Orthogonality, Differential Equations, Probability and Statistics I. 

Year 3: Computer Graphics, Distributed Systems, Machine Learning, Databases, Network Security, Group Project - Matlab Physics Simulation, Algebra III, Probability and Statistics II, Statistical Modelling.

Year 4: Computer Vision, Computational Finance, Machine Learning and Neural Computation, Advanced Topics in Software Engineering, Intelligent Data and Probabilistic Inference, Survival Models and Actuarial Applications, Stochastic Simulation, Internship - Ocado Technology, Final Project - Spotting the Wisdom in the
Crowds.

MSci Joint Mathematics and Computer Science

Computing (A), Mathematics (A), Further Mathematics (A), Physics (A).

UK A-Levels

Mathematics (A), ICT (A), Double Award Science (AA), English Language (A), English Literature (A), Applied Business Studies (BB), Media Studies (A), Graphics Design (A), French (B). First introduction to a persistence store, Microsft Access.

UK GCSEs

Ongoing upstream contributions by Traffic Parrot to this HTTP mock server capability.

WireMock

SystemTray

Added support for newlines in string literals. Helping to improve API syntax and semantics.

Handlebars.java

Added extension points for interoperability with other plugins I wrote for this library, as well as various frontend and backend fixes discovered while using it at Sky.

YatSpec

Helped to identify and  x some concurrency issues. Externalized some Docker
con guration using environment variables and volume mounts.

Patterdale

Fixed compatibility with a non-standard JUnit runner, and made debug stack traces visible on failure.

PIT Mutation Testing

Fixed a thread leak issue when closing the HTTP client, where a resource was shut down without then waiting for termination.

Apache HttpComponents

Improved some Java API semantics by memoizing a read-once result set so that it could be read many times.

DataSource Proxy

Changed the table format slightly to have borders

TableWriter

Helped to identify and fix a concurrency issue.

RxStore

Made HTTPS con gurable and fixed a bug with zero-length content.

Utterlyidle

Fixed a multi-touch bug seen on iOS devices.

TouchSwipe jQuery Plugin

This is a simple Android application that allows you to calculate the benefit (or not!) of purchasing a travel card. I originally made this as part of the “Creative, Serious and Playful Science of Android Apps” Coursera course.

Travel Card Calculator

This is a simple Android application that allows you to compute the Annual Equivalent Rate given a series of past contributions and a current value.

AER Calculator

A combination of the Try monad and the Either monad, to help tame complex business flows. A small Java 8 library that can help you model a 3-part (happy/sad/exception) business flow. No more try-catch blocks if you don’t want to use them! Railway Oriented Programming.

Business Flows

Learning prototypes to explore writing a compiler targeting the Java Virtual Machine and .NET framework. Included static constant folding for simple expressions.

Compiler Prototypes

Learning prototype to explore writing a compiler parser. Implements a variation of the Marpa algorithm and uses an NFA encoded in an OBDD to implement a scanner that preserves location information.

Compiler Parser Prototype

Example of tracing public method calls at runtime to produce a sequence diagram in a unit test, by using ByteBuddy AOP to intercept method calls

YatSpec Runtime Sequence Diagrams

Learning prototypes to explore writing a fluent facade over multiple common Java HTTP clients, so that implementations can be swapped without changing the client API code.

Thin HTTP Client

Plugin for the YatSpec acceptance test library that allows the parameter coercion from Zohhak to be applied to @Table tests in YatSpec.

YatSpec Zohhak Plugin

Enforce dependencies between packages in a unit test!

Domain Enforcer

Tool to enforce that certain classes are only ever constructed once, by using ByteBuddy AOP to intercept constructor calls.

Singleton Enforcer

BDD framework to help write tests in a fluent way, reusing givens, whens and thens.

Fluent BDD

Synchronize your Steam categories with the popular tags on the Steam store!

Steam Category Sync

Learning prototypes to explore writing a static analysis framework that ensures that a given Domain Driven Design glossary of included and excluded words is adhered to in unit tests.

Domain Glossary

This project implements a simple Kanban simulation to investigate the effects a Kanban approach can have on a software development pipeline.

Personal details

Liam W.

Summary

Technical skills

Work Experience

Education

Personal Projects