Tomson Boylett

Work Experience

Software Engineer

Uniper | 2017 – 2019

I took part in a variety of projects during my placement year. My first duty was to provide technical support where I was extremely influential in our support process improvement. I took initiative and scrutinised our support processes suggesting ideas to team members and making changes as appropriate. An example of a change I made was cutting down and standardising the canned responses. Inspired by my actions, my manager created regular support improvement meetings. This helped make our support work-flow more efficient.

In the second half of the placement year, I was fortunate to work with modern web technologies on a software project. This web application used a Vue.js front-end with a Python back-end. I got to experience first-hand some of the difficulties of writing software for a real client. I came onto this project late and had to quickly learn the relevant technologies so I could join the development team. My flexibility and resilience helped us deliver a compelling demo to the stakeholders and allowed work on this project to continue.

As a result of my achievements during the placement year, Uniper is hiring me to continue a project as part of my dissertation. This challenging project involves automating the inspection of gas turbines using computer vision technologies.

Education

Computer Science with Industrial Placement

Newcastle University | 2015 – Present

Year 1 and 2 Averages of 84 and 86%

Led a team of 10 people to create a treasure hunting mobile app. I helped create a project plan and broke down each step into many small jobs which could be delegated to all 10 members of the team. I used my experience working with my team in first year to help me delegate tasks to match their strengths. Through effective communication and organisation of my team, I drove us to achieve a first for our project.

Strengthened my critical analysis skills by writing a literature review on privacy and security in cloud computing. I achieved a result of 84%.

Created a web application for managing key allocations. This required me to learn how to use the lecturer’s framework which provided little documentation. I first learnt how to use the framework’s ORM and template engine and then read through existing code in the framework so I could adapt it to my solution. The framework used PHP, RedBean, Twig and a variety of front-end libraries. During development I ran the framework in a Docker container for ease of use.

Egglescliffe School | 2013 – 2015

A-Levels Mathematics (A*) Physics (A) Information Technology (B)

AS-Levels Computing (A) Further Mathematics (A)

Achievements

I implemented a real-time ellipse detection algorithm in my spare time. This required me to read and understand a highly technical paper and helped me gain knowledge in the computer vision field.

Completed a contract job which required me to implement a WorldPay payment gateway on a WordPress site. I knew this task would be difficult as previous people hired were unsuccessful in completing the job. I quickly got started and learnt how to create a WordPress plugin to interact with the WorldPay API – making sure my solution was PCI compliant. As we communicated through email I sent regular updates along with instructions so they could interact with prototypes of the system and provide feedback.

Completed my AS computing course through self-study as an extra-curricular activity. I had only 1 hour of contact time per week with a teacher. The language tested in this course was Python.

Tutored year 11s with their GCSE computing course. I successfully balanced both my A level workload with planning and organising tutorial sessions with my tutees.