Joshua Paling



Professional Profile

I'm a technical leader, with 20 years of experience in the software industry.

I have experience across the full lifecycle of web apps, from meeting with clients to scope requirements, through to database design, both frontend and backend web development, managing server configuration and deployment, and long term code maintenance.

I'm very conscientious. I write good quality, readable/maintainable, bug-free code, and focus on effectively managing technical debt.

I'm easy to work with, a good communicator, and am comfortable meeting with non-technical stakeholders to develop technical specs. I also have experience managing small development teams.


Key Skills

Web application development (Ruby on Rails / Node.js specialist)


Expert experience

  • Javascript / Node.js
  • SQL (Postgres & MySQL)
  • ReactJS
  • Redux
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Automated testing
  • HTML5, CSS3 / SASS
Strong experience

  • D3.js
  • Heroku
  • Gulp
  • Ansible
  • Capistrano
  • Continuous Integration (BuildKite, CircleCI)
  • Laravel

Professional Experience

Head Of Engineering, Luxury Escapes
September 2020 – present

Reporting to the CEO, I lead the tech department at Luxury Escapes.

Head Of Engineering - Sydney, Luxury Escapes
April 2020 – September 2020

Luxury Escapes is the larger sister company of Lux Everyday, my previous role.

Head Of Engineering, Lux Everyday
Sept 2018 – April 2020

Reporting to the CEO, I manage the engineering team at Lux Everyday, though I still spend a decent percentage of my time hands on with code.

Senior Software Engineer, Lux Everyday (contract role)
April 2018 – Sept 2018

I helped build a multi-tenanted platform for selling "everyday experiences", and migrated Lux Everyday's existing "experience" brands to this new platform. The platform's first brand, Scoopon, re-launched in July.
(Microservices, Node.js, React, Redux)

Senior Software Engineer, Small Multiples (contract role)
August 2016 – April 2018

I worked on a "School Planning Assistance Tool" for the NSW Department of Education. The tool allow school planners to create multiple 15-year scenarios for regions of schools, and evaluate which is best on the basis of metrics like meeting projected population growth, cost, saved maintenance cost, average student travel time, and more.
(Node.js, React, Redux)

Senior Software Engineer, Peopleplan (contract role)
May - August 2016

I worked in an agile team, developing a multi-tenanted xAPI-compliant Learning Management System.
(Rails, Laravel, React, jQuery, Postgres, Mongo)

Founder, Technical Director/Developer, BBL Digital
2012 – 2016

I led the technical side of BBL Digital, both meeting with clients to scope out requirements for technical projects, building / maintaining web applications, and overseeing the work of contractors and junior developers.

www.themanchallenge.com.au: Event-based online health and fitness program for men. I met with the client to scope out technical requirements, wrote the majority of the code, and have maintained the codebase since the site launched in early 2015.
(Rails, React, Reflux, jQuery, Postgres)

www.thebigvault.com.au: Bespoke Employee Relationship Management system for Brand Influence Group. Among other functions, the system automatically manages the delegation of time- and location-sensitive jobs to BIG's several hundred casual employees, each of whom have unique and potentially variable hours of availability. The system has drastically decreased the amount of manual admin work required to allocate jobs to employees, improved issues regarding employee reliability and accountability for allocated jobs, and improved visibility / transparency with regards to how BIG measures employee performance.

The project has been used in production since 2013, and although I've moved on from BBL Digital, I continue to maintain the codebase to this day.
(Rails, jQuery, MySQL)

Freelance Web Developer
2008 – 2012

Software Developer, Lokanet
2004 – 2008


Community

I'm involved in the Sydney and Australian Ruby community: