Armand Bernard's Web CV

Software Engineer at Redgate Software

Test Data Manager product (2024 - now)

1. .NET Core
2. CircleCI
3. C#
4. MUI
5. Postgres
6. React
7. SQL
8. TypeScript
9. Unit testing
10. End-to-end testing

Brought onto TDM (Test Data Manager) product to improve front-end standards and upskill engineers. TDM had been in development for 1 year at the time. TDM is a product for making copies production data without sensitive data and smaller footprint for developers to test against.

Organised the Honeycomb Champions, a cross-team initiative and working group to:

• Upskill one person per team in front-end so they can be the go-to person for front-end.
• Make improvements to the front-end's architecture and quality.
• Implement the latest design system guidance and improve said design system.

Mainline work around orchestration including:

• Designing an easy to use system for error handling. Includes: Standard error types, error handling middleware, error display componentry.
• Helping to build and integrate a cross-database (SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL) database provisioning system.
• Helping design each piece of UI work with the designers.
• Writing product documentation.
• Implementing synchronization of data with other Redgate products via API calls and scheduled sync jobs.
• Running a small team for 2 months to help transform our UI and APIs for our new Workflows approach to test data management.
• Refactoring our tests and CI processes to be faster and easier to understand.

Other improvements:

• Creating a type-safe system for calling API endpoints.
• Fixing all accessibility issues in the product.
• Modifying working practices to ensure high accessibility is maintained.
• Implementing feature flags to help reduce branch life.
• Adding many linters to improve code quality.
• Pushing for a product-wide Git policy (rebase + merge-commit).
• Making an official dark theme possible by enforcing the use of semantic colours.
• Implementing front-end code-splitting to improve first-load performance.
• Performance and responsiveness optimization of large React pages.

Honeycomb Design System (2021-2024, alongside regular work)

1. CircleCI
2. Design system
3. GitHub Actions
4. MUI
5. React
6. TypeScript
7. Tailwind

Heavily involved in the development and maintenance of the Redgate's design system, Honeycomb.

• Strategy calls with the stakeholders and backers of the design system, including the heads of Engineering and Design.
• Helping to choose the technologies and libraries to use for the newest implementation.
• Writing CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions, bash, npm.
• Migrating from GitHub Actions to CircleCI
• Designing new patterns in collaboration with designers.
• Co-hosting a workshop at the company conference on how to use MUI, including a talk about how to develop accessible components with MUI.
• Several talks on best practices: Which components to use in what situation and how.
• Several deep-dives on MUI functionality.
• Writing automated screenshot tests

Redgate Monitor product (2021-2023)

1. .NET Core
2. C#
3. React
4. SQL
5. Tailwind
6. TypeScript
7. Unit testing

Worked as a full-stack software engineer on Redgate Monitor (formerly SQL Monitor), a mature (13+ years) database monitoring tool targeted at database administrators. At the time, SQL Monitor had 3-4 dev teams with 5-6 people in each. At this point they are at 7 such teams.

• Worked on many of the core features of the product, including: tags, current activity, query search, recommendations, query tracking, top queries and procedures, query impact and actual plans. Just to name a few.
• Front-end web-app development using TypeScript, React and Tailwind.
• Writing front-end unit tests using Jest and React Testing Library.
• MVC and WebAPI back-end development with .NET Core and C#.
• Writing back-end unit and integration tests using NUnit, NSubstitute, Fluent Assertions.
• Writing a wide range of T-SQL scripts for monitoring client dbs and storing data in a local SQL Server repository.
• Championing accessibility and improving it around the product.
• Migrating code from older frameworks such as jQuery and Knockout to React.
• Planning and participating in front-end improvement task forces.

Championing accessibility and improving it in the following ways:

• More accessibility focused PRs than anyone else in the product.
• Creating a tool to automatically collect metrics on the accessibility of SQL Monitor to track our accessibility journey. The data is hosted in Azure and a Grafana dashboard was created to visualise the data.
• Introducing linters to shift-left the resolution of accessibility issues.

Manufacturing Engineer at BorgWarner

1. .NET Framework
2. C#
3. Machine Learning
4. Machine Vision
5. SQL
6. WinForms
7. WiX Toolset

Continuation of the previous role after BorgWarner acquisition of Delphi Technologies.

• Spear-heading use of Machine Learning for root-cause analysis and predictive maintenance on site via RapidMiner.
• Development of a system for detecting screw thread damage via machine vision.
  Wrote edge detection algorithms and image filters for detecting damage.
  Wrote highly custom UI components for superimposing displaying the damage to the user respectively.
• Creation of admin tools for configuring SQL Servers including:
  Mapping network drives, managing Windows services (via WMI), writing T-SQL, and monitoring databases.
• Introduction of the use of Grafana to the site. This included providing training for engineers and making Grafana dashboards for many use-cases including: Production statistics, downtime monitoring, measurement job management.

Manufacturing Engineer at Delphi Technologies

1. .NET Framework
2. C#
3. Machine Vision
4. SQL
5. WinForms
6. WiX Toolset

Worked as the sole developer in the Continuous Improvement team, a small cross-disciplinary team of manufacturing engineers and technicians. The team's goal was to create or improve systems around the factory.

Designed, developed and tested all applications mentioned below. Tech stack was mostly .NET Framework, C# and WinForms.

• A multi-application system for scheduling and completing machine maintenance.
  Included: A touch-friendly GUI designed for tablets, a fully custom Gantt chart component, email notifications, multiple authentication methods, QR Code reading.
• A microcontroller-based interlock system for quality control.
• An email-server for daily statistics reporting with user-configurable SQL data plotting capabilities.
• A multi-application system for managing metrology jobs.
  Included a touch-friendly GUI for registering jobs, TV announcement screens, notifications on remote machines. Also integrated 2D code scanning, RFID badge authentication and statistics collection.
• Writing installers with the WiX toolset with automatic updates via TeamCity.
• Fail-safe, always running code for communication with COGNEX machine vision cameras via TCP/IP and Serial.

Placement at Atkins engineering consultancy

1. .NET Framework
2. VBA
3. WinForms

1 year placement working as a civil/mechanical engineer. Mix of engineering work and trying to improve internal systems in down-time.

Engineering work was around structural verification of davit cranes for use on offshore wind farms. It included:

• Producing Mathcad calculations/simulations.
• Writing design and FMEA documents.

A significant amount of downtime between projects allowed for the writing of several pieces of software using Visual Basic for Applications. The use-cases included:

• Project planning and pricing.
• Scheduling and summarising simulations.
• Generating documents from templates using MS Word and Adobe Acrobat APIs.