Testimonials
Mark is both an extremely capable software engineer and effective team leader.
Whilst working at Jagex he was a key member of the web systems leadership team, inspiring confidence with his calm and caring manner.
Mark lead on a number of initiatives, delivering high quality solutions in a demanding environment. Balancing the need for always available services, and continual improvement.
However, Mark’s key strength is his adaptability, he can turn his hand to anything. Whether it’s high efficiency Java peer to peer networking, or configuring Linux stacks, to building single page web apps, Mark always produces high quality results. Not to mention the music, composing, and acting.
Any company I work for, will always find a place for Mark.
If you’re looking for someone who knows how to deliver I’d highly recommend Mark.
Mark is a fantastic talent to work with. I’ve had the pleasure of taking advantage of his skills at two organisations now and can attest to his skill and speed of delivery. If you’re looking for someone who knows how to deliver I’d highly recommend Mark.
Highly recommend and top of my list for freelance support.
Brilliant developer, very easy to work with. Picked up the tasks very quickly and was able to get on with the job without any issues.
I cannot express how appreciative I am of Mark’s guidance and wisdom.
Mark was my mentor when I first joined Jagex and eventually became my agile scrum team lead. I cannot express how appreciative I am of Mark’s guidance and wisdom from my first day to when he leaved. He was always supportive, knowledgeable and patient with any request I had and always had the time to guide me through unknowns.
I had the privilege of working with Mark for several years, throughout several scrum teams until he eventually became my direct superior. Throughout that time we worked on several different, successful products and I had a great time collaborating with him.
I cannot recommend Mark enough, he is an excellent and motivated individual, a smart leader and a fantastic, supportive friend.
An expert in his field and an asset in running any team.
During my time working with Mark he demonstrated himself to be a complete expert in his field, approachable, helpful and always willing to go the extra mile to help others find the solutions they needed. I’d relish the opportunity to work with Mark again some day.
Mark is an excellent software developer and is constantly looking to improve his knowledge and expertise.
He is often far too humble for his own good and if he says he is “good” at something it is likely that he is closer to being an expert. This is shown in his work as Mark applies his skills at an expert level without any apprehension.
His team [at Jagex] is one of the most effective and well run I have seen. He was specifically picked to form an elite team and that is exactly what he achieved.
I would happily work with Mark on any project in the future and I hope I get the chance to.
Portfolio
Freelance Work: Ideal Outcome Classification Service
- Backend
Designed and built from scratch a large-scale api-driven website classification service. Given a URL, it can process the epicentre content of the website, compare it to a curated set of IAB categories, and return those IAB categories that best match the content, including relevant keywords. This is used to ensure ads are displayed on the most appropriate website pages. Spring Boot microservice, MySQL, and versioned RESTful APIs, with a robust build and AWS deployment process.
Freelance Work: Ideal Outcome Management
- Frontend
Tool for IO staff to configure and manage clients, campaigns, dashboard whitelabelling, and global IAB categories. Supports uploading CSV files for bulk URL classifications against a campaign, with pause and resume support, and reporting. Includes API endpoints used by the Dashboard and ClassificationService microservice. Spring Boot application with Spring Security, MySQL with Liquibase migrations, with a robust build and AWS deployment process.
Freelance Work: Ideal Outcome Dashboard
- Frontend
Angular 7 front-end application to demonstrate the core Ideal Outcome website classification technology - classifying individual URLs, and visualising bulk historical classifications. Database-driven whitelabelling support. RESTful API calls to self-built server-side processing systems, with a robust build and AWS deployment process.
idealoutcome.io
- Full Website
Responsive WordPress website using the Divi theme, running on https. Organised the hosting infrastructure, built the website, and provided simple training so that the site owners can update content themselves.
Contract Work: Video Categorisation Demo
- Frontend
Angular 4 front-end application to demonstrate a video categorisation service. RESTful API calls to server-side processing systems. Additional javascript features such as video playback transcript following, and dynamic keywords tag cloud highlighting.
www.marksimkins.co.uk
- Full Website
This personal website, fully responsive. Set up WordPress.org install, custom domain, and heavy customisations of a simple theme. Implemented bespoke Portfolio, InfoCloud, Credits, and MindMap WordPress plugins from scratch. Also implemented robust plugin deployment bash scripts with logging and rollback functionality.
Contract Work: Jagex Project
- Backend
I can't be specific as I'm still under NDA, however I will list the technologies I used. I will flesh out this description more once the project is released!
www.websysdev.com
- Full Website
My old 'corporate' freelancing website, fully responsive. Spring Boot application, with a custom Blogger.com API integration to read the latest posts and put them on the homepage. Cookie implementation for remembering new posts. Heavily customised template, personally upgraded to SCSS.
Chronicle: RuneScape Legends
- Backend
Project lead of the server-side implementation of the website, setting up and customising HippoCMS with an NGinx reverse proxy managing the routing, and infrastructure and deployment implementations.
Chronicle Accounts System
- Backend
Highly flexible new accounts system from scratch, to handle current and any new games, designed to be easy to add new games and authentication methods in the future. First used on the Chronicle standalone client, and website. This system has now been superseded.