Karl Williams - CV

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The CV of Karl Williams: Web developer and pragmatic idealist.

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Karl Williams

Phone: 07903 226710 Email: karl@deadlight.net

Summary

I am a web developer with a decade’s experience making beautiful and functional websites and I have a passion for harnessing tech to improve the world.

I am a firm believer in the right tool for the job (rather than the right job for the cool, new tool) and approach all problems with curiosity, pragmatism and an emphasis on collaboration.


Core skills and experience

Core skills

Other skills

On my “to use” list


Work experience

Hush

Software Engineer

December 2022 - present


Arithmix

Full-stack Engineer

Jul 2022 - December 2022

Actively developing a new dimensional modelling application in a stack using C++, Python and React. I have worked on all aspects of the codebase working closely with the product team to develop features to bring the tool to market.


iTech Media

Full-stack engineer

Aug 2021 - Jul 2022

I worked in backend team writing financial reporting systems in python and PHP. Engineering projects included data cleaning, web scraping and report generation. We migrated a legacy codebase to a newer system, making heavy use of RabbitMQ to send messages between services.


Phantom

Senior developer

Nov 2020 - July 2021

Phantom is an agency with many prestigious clients; I personally worked on projects for Google and the Financial Times.

The majority of my work was for Google on their Hotel Insights project. This required parsing huge amounts of search data from Bigquery, processing it and saving it to a local Redis cache. I also extended and maintained the API delivering the processed data to the frontend of the project.


Stint

Developer

Aug 2020 - Nov 2020

At Stint, I work as a developer in the API team, using Django to provide REST and GraphQL endpoints to the web and mobile applications.


Canonical

Web developer

Oct 2013 - May 2020

At Canonical, I worked as part of the integrated web and design team looking after a large portfolio of Canonical websites and webapps including all facets of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

My role included production of frontend code for websites, webapps and our internal, open source Sass library, Vanilla Framework.

In addition to the usual CSS, HTML and JavaScript, I worked with the full array of modern web technologies. This included writing lean, efficient Sass, proficiency in some backend technologies such as Django, Flask and Jekyll and making use of a toolchain of utilities such as NPM and Docker.

I participated fully in all aspects of planning, monitoring and demoing work within Agile teams and worked closely with colleagues across engineering, design, UX and other disciplines.


IPC Media

Web developer

Mar 2008 — Oct 2013

At IPC, I worked with all aspects of a large portfolio (30+) websites with a focus on performance at scale, reuse and maintainability.

The mostly PHP-led tech stack included Symfony, Django, Wordpress and various legacy systems. In addition to frontend and backend web development, I have also maintained systems for importing external data feeds and configured deployment systems.

During my time at the company, we moved from Waterfall-style planning to Scrum/Agile and I was fully involved in driving its adoption.


Education

University of Plymouth

BSc. (Hons) Computing, awarded 2006

Other


Extra information

My hobbies and interests include:

The things that drive and excite me are:



What people say about me

Karl and I worked together at Canonical in the Web Team. His knowledge of web technologies is excellent, he is a hard worker, and made the team better for all. I would heartily recommend him or any web/tech project!

Tristram Oaten


Contact me