Who am I?

Hello!That's me

I’m Paul O’Neill, a software developer from Edinburgh.

Just now I’m taking a short family and learning-focused career break after five and a half years as a Lead .NET Web Developer at a fund manager.

My recent technology focus has been ASP.NET and Web API against Oracle and SQL Server, with Knockout and Typescript on the front-end.

My career so far has been a mixture of firmware, on-premise and cloud software development at a mixture of startups, consultancies and financial sector clients.

Contact

I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter and can be emailed through any mailbox @pablissimo.com. I’m also on GitHub, and have a (sparse) Stack Overflow Careers page.

In the beginning

I studied Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, getting a 1st-Class Honours degree and a liking for single malt whisky in the process. During my time there I entered the Microsoft Imagine Cup twice, making it to the UK Final both times.

On the back of that I became a Microsoft Student Partner, an honour I held for two years.

Lab901

I graduated from Edinburgh University, then jumped into the biotech and manufacturing arenas with local startup Lab901 doing anything from PLC programming and motion-control firmware for PIC microcontrollers to signal processing and client-side interface software for OEM biological research and diagnostic instrumentation in .NET.

I started on the TapeStation’s user interface and firmware, designing and implementing the device’s onboard operations software and Windows controller UI. I then helped improve yield in a key production step of the ScreenTape consumable from ~75% to over 96% by combining a machine vision system with bespoke real-time processing software written in .NET and running on commodity hardware.

After four years I left for challenges new and the aim of developing my client-facing skills.

Scott Logic

Scott Logic is one of the country’s premier financial services software consultancies and I joined in May 2010 with the aim of getting some client-facing experience and bolstering my software-design chops with some of the smartest developers around.

From day one I was embedded with a leading UK financial institution and spent the next two years automating manual processes and rennovating legacy systems using Oracle PL/SQL, .NET WinForms and SQL Server Reporting Services. The role was heavily client-facing and exposed again to the full product lifecycle.

miiCard

After a couple of years the call of the startup came to me in the form of miiCard, who’re helping create trust online. My initial goal was to treat the service as a black box to direct and inform the company’s business-to-business offering.

I quickly took up the mantle of designing and implementing the external programming interfaces and developer resources that let customers integrate with the service, working again in .NET on Windows Azure, this time with WCF, WebForms and ASP.NET MVC to create miiCard’s integration endpoints, developer documentation and demos.

Learning enough Java, Ruby, Python and PHP to write wrapper libraries to supplement the .NET offering I’m particularly proud of the feedback we consistently received about how easy it was to integrate the service and the quality of our developer support.