Nathan Whitworth's CV

Email :Contact Me
Location: Lancashire
D.O.B: 19th May 1983

A Brief Overview

PHP developer since May 2000, specialising in OO design and predominantly working with high traffic, large data volume sites. Exposure to multiple languages including C# and Java, and a wide variety of web specific skill sets including CSS, Javascript, Web Services (SOAP,JSON, clients & services). Test Driven Development with PHPUnit, and agile methodology with SCRUM.
In all, a very in depth understanding of everything that glues the internet together.

Employment

  • TradeDoubler AB July 2007-March 2009
    Lead Application Designer

    Since the IMW Group was acquired by TradeDoubler in 2007 I was responsible for the design of major projects within Searchware, their PPC bid management tool. My role included mentoring the team and guiding their design decisions, as well as pushing TradeDoubler towards emerging technologies and techniques.

    We adopted SCRUM, and I introduced Test Driven Development.
  • The SearchWorks (TechnologyWorks) Ltd October 2005 - July 2007
    Application Developer

    I joined The SearchWorks, then the largest PPC agency in the Europe, to help maintain and develop their industry leading PPC management tool, BidBuddy. The company was later split, with the technology being maintained, developed, and sold separately under the TechnologyWorks brand. We had an active presence across the globe in a variety of markets including France, Germany, Korea, and Japan, which presented subsequent localisation challenges.
    During my time at The SearchWorks, Microsoft released their own search offering, live.com and I was the sole developer responsible for implementing the adCenter API within BidBuddy.
  • Buy A Bike Ltd August 2004 - May 2005
    Head of ecommerce

    I joined the company to establish an online division to add to an already successful but localised bicycle retail business.

    Initially effort was focused on building a logistical framework to support mail order and online sales whereI built a basic stock control system and linked that with an equally easy to use ePOS application.

    The ePOS was written in a combination of PHP and C#, the latter being used to trigger the till drawer and print the receipt. Once I had the foundations in order I set about creating the website, initially completely bespoke, but later ported to a modified version of OSCommerce. I was responsible for supporting every aspect of the operation; from SEO, PPC, site partnerships, sales inquiries, and customer support. During my time there I built a very successful online division of the company.
  • Newreg Ltd May 2002 - April 2004
    Web Developer

    As a sister company of my previous employer, UKIP, and housed in the same offices, I moved over to Newreg - a private number plate dealer - and began to maintain and develop the site. Newreg gave me exposure to working with large volumes of data (more than 30 million rows in one table), as well as the requirement of making sure that I accessed that data in the most efficient way possible since with affiliates including Freeserve and AOL we often had huge spikes in traffic.

    Later my role at Newreg was expanded to building and supporting call centre software. I initially used Visual Basic to access their phone exchange API, thereby offering the call centre staff the ability to transfer and manipulate calls via their computer screens, as well as track call statistics. This proved to be very successful, so I developed a second expanded version using C#.
  • UKIP Ltd May 2000 - May 2002
    Junior Web Developer

    UKIP was one of the UK's first ISPs, founded in 1996. I was taken on as a junior developer and soon realised I had an absolute passion for it. I built one of the first ever PHP webmail applications as well as having a great deal of exposure to the newly born Pay Per Click industry with Goto.com. I started out using PHP3, and began my first steps into Object Oriented Programming with the later release of PHP4.

Skills & Experience

  • PHP

    PHP is my primary language and apart from occasional projects in other languages, I've used it almost every day since May 2000. I've seen the language evolve from PHP3 to the enterprise capable PHP5. I adopted PHP4's OO capability as soon as it became available, and gradually as I learnt more and ported knowledge gained in other languages, I drastically improved my ability to write efficient and scalable code. I've under taken a wide variety of projects in PHP and have experience with SOAP (clients and services), OO Design, CMS (Wordpress), and more recently I've been gaining experience with MVC frameworks, such as the Zend Framework , as well as ORM with Propel.
    This site, as a matter of fact, was entirely hand built using Zend Framework.
  • Search marketing

    Since the beginning of my career I have been involved with search marketing, from building reporting and management software to PPC account management. I have a thorough understanding of tracking technology as well and a firm grounding in SEO, affiliate marketing and CPM based models.
  • MySQL

    Throughout my career I've been using MySQL; from massive high volume databases with tens of millions of records, to designing star schemas for a data warehouse. I have a good understanding of the differences and benefits of various storage engines, as well as the capability to optimise schemas for best performance.
  • C#

    I have attended three Microsoft courses for C#, including an introduction to the .net framework, ASP.net and Windows Applications. I have had limited exposure to this language but nevertheless have build production applications and utilities. I have also used C# to build some small ASP.net projects.
  • Java

    I started using Java in the last 6 months of my time at Tradedoubler, but a great deal of experience in other languages meant it has been a fairly smooth learning curve. I don't profess to be a Java developer, I simply list it here to demonstrate my ability to adapt to requirements where necessary.
  • XHTML/CSS/Javascript

    I know the former two very well, and while I quite honestly can't stand Javascript, I can and have used in in many projects, both as standalone scripts, and more advanced form processing functionality with AJAX and jQuery.
    I am also comfortable with Photoshop, and quite capable of turning a flat design into a fully functional website.

Education

None to speak of.
I do, however, have excellent written and verbal communication skills, contribute to a popular sailing magazine, and have been awarding the Suhali Cup for documenting my attempt to sail solo around Britain in a 21ft boat. I believe the contribution to a popular sailing magazine demonstrates my communication ability, and my attempt to sail, on my own, around the UK with no previous sailing experience, demonstrates my lack of education.