Adam Chesney

Software Engineer, Architect

ajchesney@gmail.com

Profile

20+ years building innovative software products and services in agile environments. At my best when distilling complex business requirements into a clear, simple and lean software architecture. A good communicator, interested in the wider business environment and able to offer strategic insight as well as technical leadership. A passion for working with smart (and funny) people to engineer great product.

 

Currently looking for a Bitcoin/Nostr focused company to work for so that I can help to fix the money, fix the world.

Currently playing with

Here is a proof of concept TuberCheck app I'm working on which allows parents to get a summary of any YouTube video. It is built using the most excellent Supabase and OpenAI API.

 

ChatGPT and Langchain because I believe we will see a move towards an AI Directed Economy where LLM based AI Agents are co-ordinating more and more human and financial resources.

 

Potentially looking for funding to build a Nostr/Bitcoin open commerce platform

Domains

Banking & Payments

AI & Apps

Travel Tech

Skills

Infrastructure

Primarily Java server side engineering with a focus on open source tools, cloud computing and data engineering

API Design

A talent for building developer friendly web service APIs that scale

Performance

A history of performance testing, lowering costs and evolving architectures towards more elasticity, flexibility and scalability

Technical

  • Java, Spring, Micronaut
  • Microservices, Functions
  • Google Cloud Platform & AWS
  • SQL, NoSQL & Graph DB's
  • Big Data, Messaging, Kafka
  • Security, OAuth2, OIDC, FAPI
  • Continuous Integration & Delivery
  • Docker, Kubenetes
  • Test Driven Development
  • Machine Learning & Chatbots
  • Android, GraphQL
  • Javascript, Node JS

Experience

Velo Payments

Lead Platform Engineer

Jan 2018 to Present

Velo Payments is a an "all remote, no offices" start-up that was re-imagining business payments for the gig-economy. Working with a great team of people to engineer a truly next-gen, data-driven, cloud agnostic payments platform with bank-grade security. During my first 3 years with Velo I have been responsible for, among other things, increasing the throughput of the platform by a factor of 10+ and completely re-designing the security architecture in such a way that the platform can be deployed in many different scenarios including inside a bank's own network - working with the bank's existing IAM and SSO systems (whatever they may be). In the last 2 years I have become the lead platform engineer, responsible for both designing new features and integrating new payment rails.

AI Music

Lead Platform Engineer

Feb 2017 to Jan 2018

AI Music is evolving music from a static, one-directional interaction to one of dynamic co-creation. I am leading the architecture and engineering efforts to build out Google Cloud infrastructure to support a highly ambitious mobile app as a first step on that journey. This involves a Spring Boot based API, a large social graph, many innovative audio processing components and Tensor Flow models running in Google Machine Learning Engine.

 

Cloudburst Strategy

Founder, Architect & Engineer

Jan 2016 to Jan 2018

Cloudburst Strategy is a consultancy that specialises in leveraging the latest emerging cloud technologies in order to deliver value to our clients. We can work with the business to build proof of concepts or MVPs quickly and cost-effictively focusing on testing hypotheses and rapid iteration. In 2016 we have been helping one organisation in the leisure travel industry to utilise Google's new Flexible App Engine in order to build out an exciting new product as a set of Spring Boot microservices.

Screentime Labs

CTO & Engineer

Mar 2015 to Jan 2016

I came on board to help Steve grow the engineering team and the company. We had a good year with some tough challenges and in the process I had to get to grips with Google App Engine as well as some serious Android and iOS development. In the end some personal differences meant that we needed to part ways but the journey was a lot of fun.

Fourthmate

Founder, Architect & Engineer

Mar 2013 to Mar 2015

Fourthmate (now pinpointworks) was a side project for about 2 years where we built out an android client and a spring, couchdb and elastic search back end that was capable of visually tracking work lists for super yachts and schools. In the end the major problem was one of selling rather than technology.

Oracle Corporation

Principal Software Engineer

Mar 2010 to Mar 2015

Working as part of the Oracle Business Intelligence Infrastructure Team in Bristol on the BI Platform, Fusion Applications and later Oracle Public Cloud. Oracle is full of high calibre engineers and I was generally operating as the tech lead within whichever Scrum team I happened to be in.

Comtec Group

Travel Gateway Architect

May 2008 to Mar 2010

I joined Comtec on the back of promises made by the company to inject resources into the Travel Gateway division so that we could re-engineer this core component of the Comtec Travel stack. I spent the first few months designing a modular and highly scalable flight booking engine using Test Driven Design, Spring 3, Spring Web Services and Maven. However, budgetary pressures meant that I found myself in more of a technical project management role.

Onelink Travel Systems

Lead Architect & Engineer

Dec 2008 to May 2009

Funding difficulties meant that this promising start-up failed to survive. However, I spent my first 5 months with the company designing and prototyping a JEE standards based (EJB3, JPA, JAXB Web Services on JBoss), highly scalable, payment settlement system that was going to operate within the Amazon Web Services cloud (EC2, SQS, S3) that would have been capable of handling at least 300 million transactions per year. The RIA administration console has also been prototyped using Microsoft Silverlight and talking to the back end using SOAP Web Services.

Multicom Products Ltd

Chief Architect & Development Team Leader

Sep 1999 to Dec 2008

Leading the development team in building an industry leading XML web service on an open source Java software stack. My job evolved along with the company and my main duties included systems architecture (new developments), software engineering (new systems and enhancements to the current systems), liaising with the other department heads (prioritising developments and open issues) and managing the work load of the development team. Although I am a capable department head, my interests clearly lie in the fields of Software Architecture and Engineering rather than managing people, which is really why I went looking for something else.

    Key Achievements during my time at Multicom:
  • Recommended and then implemented a move of the companies development platform from Visual C++ Windows software (with in house scripting language) to Open Source Java
  • Re-wrote the companies core product (Windows desktop client) as a Java client/server application
  • Designed & implemented the first leisure GDS Web Service in the UK (and in doing so:)
  • Invented my own Java/XML data binding framework (before the term was coined)
  • Invented my own Inversion of Control framework (before Spring was first released)
  • Implemented my own high performance, XML aware, software load balancer with sticky sessions allowing us to operate the Web Service across multiple servers and sites without loss of service due to upgrades or hardware failure
  • Implemented a powerful Management Intelligence auditing framework which allows the company to track detailed statistics and automatically produce user-defined reports
  • Implemented an automated testing service which uses real-world user sessions from the previous days trading to regression test the latest software updates before they are rolled out to the live servers
  • Designed & implemented our next generation Web Services platform built on top of an open source software stack (Spring, Hibernate, XFire etc) which included highly modular service plug-in architecture, intelligent caching and virtual session technology.

Education

University of Bristol, UK

4 yr Masters of Engineering in Computer Systems Engineering — 2.1

Final year thesis was a set of C++ Neural Nets and an engine that used genetic algorithms to converge on the optimum network topology for any given problem domain & dataset.

Other Interests

Being a good dad to my 3 amazing kids

Watching every Liverpool FC match

Sometimes I try to start businesses :0)

Everything Bitcoin... fix the money, fix the world.

Adam Chesney — ajchesney@gmail.com