I have been writing software since 1981, when Dad brought home a ZX81. Since then I have used more than a dozen different programming languages, and I still enjoy writing code and using software to solve problems, whatever the language.

I have been SC cleared for about four years, from when my current role within HMRC started. Nominally, the role is 'Front End Developer', but I have been leading on a range of software projects, writing full stack code from the HTML/JavaScript/CSS front-end, though the .Net/.Net core C# MVC web tier, past the Entity Framework/Entity Core database access later, down to the Dockerfile and bash scripts to automate the build.

As an example, a couple of years ago, HMRC needed to update 'COBRA', a Microsoft Access application that was used to track the near-real-time flow of money into and out of the department's bank accounts as customers make payments to us, and as we make payments to customers. The outputs from this app are sent to the Treasury fine times a day to inform them of how much cash on hand the government has.

As a Microsoft Access application, the previous version was restricted to a single user. This didn't fit very well with the high-profile nature of the application, and I was asked to rewrite it as a high availability solution.

I designed the solution around an AWS RDS MSSQL Server instance running in Multi-AZ replication mode. After that, it was a fairly standard C# .NET Framework MVC application, duplicated across two EC2 frontend machines (again, split across two AWS availability zones for redundancy).

My current role is split between development and system administration. The sysadmin part of the role covers creating and maintaining the CI/CD solution for the team. We have been using a self hosted install of GitLab as a git server and job runner, along with copies of Jenkins installed on our EC2 instances to take care of actual deployment.

Most recently, we are in the process of moving to the departments hosted Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tooling; including their GitLab install, Artifactory, and Vault. We are also moving to a Kubernetes (K8S) cluster, so I have been updating our build pipelines to use Docker to make container images for deployment.

Our teams move to .NET Core has helped the move to containers, as ASP Framework apps only really work well under Windows. However, the move to ASP Core on Linux container has meant that we are using Oauth 2 against Azure Active Directory for authentication/authorization instead of Kerberos and local Domain Active Directory.

While the team owns our main project, we are called in to help other projects, since we seem to have a reputation as a team that works quickly and well. For example, last year I was working with the Inteligent Payment Project (IPP) to build them an MVC application to capture data from front line users and submit it to the projects API. I worked with the architect and the product team from early in the design process to make sure that the form I was building was as simple as possible, by avoiding asking the user for information that wasn't needed by the backend process, or that could be synthesized from other answers.