Dave Burt

Covaler provides data-driven solutions, software development services, and digital transformation services, and features a depth of experience in financial services data. We offered both consulting (for clients including BIG4 Holiday Parks and Ipsos) and products, most notably the Acceleon, Talefin and Beddoes financial services data platforms, and Effective Coach for driving enterprise-wide coaching excellence.

My roles have included:

• Evolving system architecture, team resourcing and training within heterogenous and legacy technology environments.
• Managing business transitions, integrating Beddoes business and data platforms into Covaler and sold assets out into Adviser Ratings.
• Recovering troubled client projects, focusing on team sustainability, product reliability and development cycle time.
• Transforming our engineering team culture from Panic-Driven Development to reliable continuous delivery, using Effective Coach, mentoring, training and cultural event initiatives.
• Improving software delivery lead time from weeks to hours, on an app that supported 10x business growth for our major client over 4 years.
• Designing and building an engineering dashboard to track and improve DORA software delivery metrics alongside product success, business value, and incident management metrics.
• Signing up new clients for both consulting and for our SaaS and data products.

Beddoes is data and technology company with top tier clients in the financial services and pharmaceutical sectors. Allori is a healthcare communications agency.

It has grown in the time I've been there from a fresh startup to an established and recognised agency with international reach, working for most of the top 20 global Pharma companies and almost all Australian life insurers.

My role has grown accordingly from part-time web dev slash sysadmin to full time strategic business software development and deployment, managing up to 4 devs and a system administrator, and taking care of hundreds of software projects. I've focused on:

• Building and leading software development teams
• Architecting data pipelines and platforms (with Rails, Python, and Azure)
• Migration of office data centre to cloud (closing physical office due to COVID-19)
• Gathering and presenting industry insights to insurance industry leaders.
• Arranging secure transfer of data with executives, managers and analysts of top-tier clients
• Establishing ISO 27001-compliant information security policies and processes
• Slick iPad presentations of various kinds (native-hybrid, web-based, various presenter software)
• Full stack web development (>200 projects, Rails, Sinatra, PHP, static, custom pipelines)
• iOS apps (HTML Presenter and mHubs, numerous hybrid apps with Cordova)
• Development infrastructure and processes (e.g. migrating > 100 projects from local Subversion to Bitbucket, establishing continuous integration)
• Deployment process management (Capistrano, Chef, Ansible, shell, Ruby)
• Network and systems (Linux and Windows servers and desktops, Mac desktops, VPN)
• Monitoring, logging and backup systems (NewRelic, HipChat, Papertrail)
• Training and professional development for our small I.T. team
• Supervision and coaching across most of those tasks

Some publicly-accessible examples of my work while at Allori/Beddoes:

• eFFECTIV Coach
• Tess - Beddoes Adviser Discovery Platform
• Beddoes Research Platform
• Most Trusted Advisers
• HTML Presenter
• eCloser

Illuminus was small Melbourne-based Web Design and Multimedia business. We crafted web applications using Ruby on Rails, PHP, Flash, and provided graphic design, hosting, consulting and other IT services. After the partnership split up, I ran Illuminus a sole trader. My roles included:

• general I.T. consulting,
• systems analysis and design,
• programming (websites (HTML/JS/CSS), web apps (Rails, PHP), scripting (Ruby, VBA), automation (Office/VBA)), and
• systems administration (Linux).

When my role expanded beyond the completion of the four-week project I was hired for, I comprised 33% of the IT workforce at the company (then called GasNet Australia) of around 200. I was responsible for the majority of internal software development and application maintenance from then until my resignation. I designed, developed and maintained software for:

• employee timesheets (ASP/VB, SQL Server)
• visualising metering data (MS Access and Excel)
• other various business systems (Access, SQL server, ASP.NET, C, scripting languages)
• scripts for the sysadmin team
• auditing contractor-built software

Placed here as part of my Bachelor of Information Technology, as part of a small team managing a big data warehouse system, I developed thoroughly-reviewed COBOL, Oracle SQL, Perl, shell scripts, and C programs which were deployed on the warehouse's IBM mainframes and Linux server.

Placed here as part of my Bachelor of Information Technology, I began work on the incoming transition of a large outsourcing project shortly after its inception and left soon after it got into full swing. My roles included developing project procedures and tools, supporting management of the transition, application support (INGRES SQL and 4GL, and C), enhancements and ad-hoc reports on the main application, software auditing, and development of a separate, complementary ASP/SQL Server system.