This is a brief overview of my (Simon Le Pine) experience working in technology and software development. The majority of my career has been insurance+technology so I feel my resume & job titles do not accurately outline my software/data engineering experience. My hope is this provides a valuable resource in addition to
my resume, which can be found here.
- 1999 to 2011 - Side projects and startup ideas
- Started on old LAMP servers.
- I had an old Geocities account back when that platform existed and people used the <blink> tag.
- Worked with PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Flash/Actionscript, etc.
- Tech startups were never really successful but I had a strong focus on security and sound development practices. I've also never had a server or email hacked.
- 2012 to 2014 - Guardian Risk Managers
- Hired to build & release online home insurance.
- At this time Lloyd’s of London was very new to online insurance and very nervous about the risk exposure.
- Planned the application architecture, information security, automated underwriting decisions, etc (to satisfy Lloyd's of London).
- 2014 to 2016 - Optimum Insurance
- Built an internal web app that managed all new & renewal insurance policies.
- PostgreSQL with stored procedures mirroring an Oracle data warehouse.
- Local web app server was NGINX + PHP + JS/HTML
- Replaced many duplicate data entry workflows and 100’s of Excel spreadsheets.
- 2016 to 2018 - Cansure Insurance
- Built a noSQL data lake as a single source of truth for company data.
- The database server was Debian+MariaDB, the application server was Debian+Apache+PHP.
- Pulled in data from underwriting, claims, accounting, and HR. Primarily these were in Excel or CSV format.
- Built scheduled jobs and stored procedures to created structured tables (materialized views) from the unstructured noSQL data lake.
- Built a public-facing web app allowing insurance brokers to buy construction insurance policies.
- Built a public-facing web app for association members to renew insurance policies and pay via merchant processing account.
- 2018 to 2020 - On disability recovering from a near-fatal car crash.
- Took courses on Python3 and Django while recovering.
- Built a data access tool for OSME (Office of Small & Medium Enterprise, Federal Government of Canada) using Lakebed.io for data storage.
- 2020 to present - ITS Consulting
- Built a dashboard for ITS clients to view the status of various IT systems (email server downtime, power outages, firewall, phishing emails, dark web monitoring, etc).
- Built a web app for previewing 3D printing files in augmented reality. The file conversion code was written in Python3 and Bash.
- Built a web app for a religious organization to store gigabytes of audio/video content on AWS S3 and integrate with their WordPress site.
- Managed a global HR intranet where they share jobs, talk about industry trends, etc.
- After a full code review the existing developer of the HR intranet was fired and I was asked to fully rebuild the application as the code was of such poor quality.
- 2018 to Present - Personal/Side Projects
- Herstasis:
- A friend’s fem-tech startup focusing on women's health data.
- Setup a local PostgreSQL server for storage.
- Parsed multiple Excel files into a PostgreSQL noSQL data store.
- Used PHP, Python, and Metabase for data cleaning, manipulation, and visual analysis.
- Lakebed:
- A self-hosted, on-prem data lake option in the same way WordPress can be a self-hosted website/CSM.
- PHP (7+)
- svelte.js/TypeScript - Refactoring/rebuilding from an outdated PHP->HTML model
- MariaDB/noSQL
- Connect-us:
- A tool/idea making it easy for strangers to connect
- svelete.js + Node.js + MongoDB
- Hosted on Heroku via Github pipelines.
- Applicant Fit
- A tool/idea for automating the first round interviews for job applicants and apply AI/ML to question responses.
- svelte.js/TypeScript front-end.
- PHP back-end.
