About Mathew

I’m Mathew James, I have lived in Swansea all my life. While studying for my degree in Computer science I worked part time in the DVLA during the evenings. During this time I managed to get promoted twice while still studying for my degree. While studying to pass my degree at a 2:1 level in the day, I was also in charge of over 60 staff at night on the fast keying section. I gained valuable experience during this time which I still call upon to this day.

On gaining my BSc in Computer Science, I was lucky enough that at the same time a developer job was advertised in the systems development area of the DVLA. I was promoted to senior developer and enjoyed being the lead developer for the projects that I worked on.

My main successes to date are merging a number of internal Intranet systems into a single content management systems allowing easier support and scalability.  I also wrote a system which interacts with the Scottish courts and Scottish police to prosecute drivers in Scotland. My latest successes have got to be re-designing and re-platforming the vehicle tax, SORN and vehicle enquiry services. These public facing services need to be able to cope with high user traffic and the vehicle tax system is responsible for more than 44 million transactions a year earning billions of pounds a year for government.

I have migrated the DVLA payments platform from EC2 and Dropwizard to containerising it and rewriting the majority of components to springboot on a kubernetes cluster.

I am currently working on a transformation piece. Migrating a legacy service to use modern serverless  event based workflow system.

I have worked as a lead software engineer for both the DVLA and the Intellectual Property Office.  I pride myself in ensuring my team members are happy with the workload and are significantly challenged on a daily basis.

Outside of work I am a keen golfer, runner, general fitness and enjoy the sport of boxing. Here is my strava profile:

I also enjoy doing freelance web development outside of my day job and have built many successful websites over the years ranging from custom web applications, ecommerce stores and both static websites and websites built in CMS systems. Whilst working with various content management systems I decided there was a gap in the market for a CMS that not only delivered a simple tool to build a website but also offered hosting without the expensive cost and websites being covered in advertisement. Myinstansite.co.uk was born. The site is simple to use and offers customers a no hassle 30 day free trial to get up and running before purchasing the package. Even then they are not tied into a lengthy contract as myinstantsite only offers a rolling monthly contract. A great tool to get anyone online quickly and cheaply.

My latest project that I am working on is software to analyse the odds from various bookmakers to find a sporting event that offers a guaranteed profit. This is known as an arbitrage bet. These types of bets have been around for years but now with the increasing number of bookmakers online these bets are easier to find and exploit. I have migrated web services and site across 3 cloud providers. This site was originally hosted on AWS. It was migrated to theMicrosoft Azure platform and it now lives on Google Cloud.

If you want to contact me on any of the above or are interested in using my services for a web project of idea you have then use my contact form on this site.

My evaluation

I have tried to evaluate my main skills to give an idea of what I could potentially offer you if you are considering using me for a freelance project

My skills

Wordpress
75% Complete
CI CD
100% Complete
HTML + CSS
85% Complete
Java
90% Complete
Spring boot
95% Complete
Dropwizard
90% Complete
Leading a development team
100% Complete
Database development
85% Complete
Agile
100% Complete
Javascript
75% Complete
Serverless
75% Complete