Nicholas Armstrong
Head of Architecture
- Erina, NSW, Australia
- 0405 304 911
- nick@n15g.com
18 Years
Nicholas Armstrong
Head of Architecture
- Erina, NSW, Australia
- 0405 304 911
- nick@n15g.com
Work History
2022Present
Head of Architecture - Open Payments
AP+
- Played a leading role in the ongoing design, collaboration and coordination of the Coles QR project.
- Managed project roadmaps and release coordination in-lieu of a dedicated release manager.
- Spearheaded a quality-focused review and refactor of the eQR APIs, resulting in a considerable improvement in clarity, consistency and ease-of-use of the product.
- Managed a complex dependency tree (nicknamed "The tech tree") that visualized and tracked several dozen technical dependencies across the complex Coles QR project.
- Managed a growing team of Solution architects, growing from 2 to 5 members under my leadership.
20212022
Solution Architect, Chapter Lead
Beem It
- Promoted to chapter lead for Architecture in mid-2022.
- Responsible for the solution architecture of the "Beem for Business" platform offering.
- Extensive collaboration with external stakeholders on the Coles QR solution.
20182021
Solution Architect/Tech Lead
NewsCorp Australia
- Worked closely with the Head of Product and Platform Manager for the News Concierge platform to design and implement solutions to business requirements.
- Migrated the project team from various issue-management systems to JIRA with integrations to CI, code-quality and deployment tooling for full visibility through the entire software development pipeline.
- Developed the migration strategy for moving the News classifieds platform away from the legacy pagination platform to a new Salesforce-integrated alternative.
- Responsible for the design, development and integration of several core systems for the NewsAdds platform including publication scheduling, a graphical ad-builder tool and multi-dimensional rates tables for print classifieds and advertising.
- Developed and deployed a set of libraries and a cloud-based microservice for producing print classified and advertising creative from simple JSON payloads.
- Implemented Continuous Integration into an existing platform deployment pipeline.
- Replaced the grunt-based front-end build stack with Webpack 4.
20162018
Senior Full-stack Developer
NewsCorp Australia
- Assisted in the design and deployment of the greenfield NewsAdds (now News Concierge) classifieds booking platform which has gone on to generate over $28m in revenue.
- Developed a greenfield social media campaign management platform for the NewsXtend team with a deployed and utilized production release on the 3rd day of development.
20132016
Technical Architect/Team Lead
Pegasus Management
- Responsible for the technical and solutions architecture of the 'Apollo' project, the next-generation version of Pegasus' flagship product 'Onsite Track Easy'.
- Delivered the Apollo project to production in December 2015.
- Championed a organizational focus on code quality and clarity, implementing modern CI and code analysis tools such as SonarQube and Structure101.
- Maintained a zero-tangle Java architecture through the enforcement of practical modular design patterns. This architecture facilitates greater agility by reducing the cross-cutting impact of change.
- Managed a full cloud migration of development infrastructure to the cloud. Repositories, CI, test environments, etc. are all hosted off-site with significant reductions in maintenance overheads as well as greater accessibility for remote workers.
- Designed an implementation-agnostic payment module for the web application that allowed for new payment gateways to be registered without any changes to existing code.
- Utilizing TeamCity and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, implemented automated deployment infrastructure that allows for one-click deployments into any environment, including production.
20102013
Senior Developer/Systems Administrator
Pegasus Management
- Integrated agile methodologies into the existing development process, eventually fully replacing the previous waterfall approach.
- Architected and built a new hardware-agnostic kiosk application designed for tablet-PC environments using a JavaFX interface and backed by 100% RESTful APIs.
- Established a beach-head of new git repositories, eventually migrating all development to git repositories.
- Implemented an internal Continuous Integration platform including automated test, build and delivery of both kiosk and SaaS application software.
20072010
Software Developer/Systems Administrator
Pegasus Management
- Rolled out hundreds of new kiosk units utilizing my refactored architecture.
- Migrated application server infrastructure to a virtualized private cloud model that allowed the application to scale in the face of rapid growth.
- Pioneered the use of JIRA and Confluence servers for issue management and knowledge decentralization.
- Ported all internal source repositories to SVN from the struggling CVS system.
- Retrofitted a clustered second-level caching system into the Onsite platform.
20062007
Software Developer
Pegasus Management
- Commenced a solo project to completely overhaul Pegasus' unwieldy kiosk software.
- Took over responsibility for the maintenance of application infrastructure.
- Transformed the application from a single-host SaaS platform to a multi-server architecture.
- Diagnosed and remedied key performance bottlenecks in application page structure resulting in orders-of-magnitude performance improvements.
20052006
Trainee Software Developer
Pegasus Management
- Offered a programming traineeship at Pegasus after applying for an unrelated position.
- Promoted to full-time position after 11 months.
- Developed a new mechanism for configuring Pegasus Kiosk units without requiring OS-level modification.
- Designed a new hardware access control unit with server-side validation capabilities to replace the existing 'dumb' controllers used on several mine sites in the Hunter Valley.