Hi, I'm Michael de Silva.

Tackling challenging problems is my passion, and I'm driven to deliver well-engineered pragmatic solutions daily.

Since April 2017, I have worked on Dotpedia as a SaaS "Product" — finessing not only its UI/UX & Angular frontend as well as backend challenges and architecting a Cloud-provider agnostic almost-12factor compliant solution in AWS.

Furthermore, I've had the opportunity of working with small to mature startups, corporate organisations to large brands and agencies from different parts of the globe delivering eCommerce solutions to Autoglym, Whitespace, Civica, PoshPaws International, AndyThornton, Crestwood and a lot more.

My background is that of an engineer in the truest sense — I've achieved a BEng (Hons) 2.ii in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the University of Leeds and a MSc (with Distinction) in Mechatronics from King's College London, United Kingdom.

I work as a consultant to international clients, having founded Secure Cloud Solutions (Inertialbox).

Hi, I'm Michael de Silva.

Tackling challenging problems is my passion, and I'm driven to deliver well-engineered pragmatic solutions daily.

Since April 2017, I have worked on Dotpedia as a SaaS "Product" — finessing not only its UI/UX & Angular frontend as well as backend challenges and architecting a Cloud-provider agnostic almost-12factor compliant solution in AWS.

Furthermore, I've had the opportunity of working with small to mature startups, corporate organisations to large brands and agencies from different parts of the globe delivering eCommerce solutions to Autoglym, Whitespace, Civica, PoshPaws International, AndyThornton, Crestwood and a lot more.

My background is that of an engineer in the truest sense — I've achieved a BEng (Hons) 2.ii in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the University of Leeds and a MSc (with Distinction) in Mechatronics from King's College London, United Kingdom.

I work as a consultant to international clients, having founded Secure Cloud Solutions (Inertialbox).

Capabilities

Selected Work

  • When I started out in April 2017 and was handed over Dotpedia — at the time I received a single EC2 instance in AWS with a development stack powered by Rails and Capistrano.

    Dotpedia

    At launch, having taken a 12factor inspired approach, the hand-built stack spanned 8 nodes for production alone. The goal I had been given was to build a system that used AWS but was also "for the most part" Cloud-provider agnostic.

    The front-end is very modern and decoupled from the Rails asset-pipeline; it is Webpack powered (with a light wrapper in Gulp) and AngularJS driven. All credit is due to Walter Dumlao for the frontend wizardry as he is a master with Angular & UI/UX.

    April 2017 - April 2018 — Dotpedia for Nano Magnetics (Remote)

    Rails, C++14 (over IPC), AngularJS, Webpack, AWS, Docker, DevOps & SaaS Architecting at Scale.

  • Bootstrapped initial Rails & Sinatra apps for Raden's internal API. Implemented all mobile-API end-points including Facebook OAuth (server-side for iOS) via TDD/BDD with RSpec, Capybara & PhantomJS.

    Tied the bag inventory withing Solidus (Spree) handling the shipping life-cyle within the app as state-machines. Tracking notifications from UPS were handled as webhooks (from EasyPost/Segment.io) post to the internal API, and in turn sending iOS push notifications to authenticated user devices.

    Raden

    October 2015 - January 2016 — Stembolt (Remote)

    Rails, Sinatra, Solidus, RSpec, Capybara, Poltergeist & PhantomJS

  • Managed Autoglym's global-eCommerce platform — both Rails app development and DevOps via Chef to manage app infrastructure.

    November 2013 - September 2015 — Whitespace UK (Remote)

    Rails, RefineryCMS, Spree, ThinkingSphinx

  • Delivered PhoneGap integrated Rails/Spree platform for Autoglym Professional for their launch into the Chinese market with multi-lingual (i18n) iPad app support along with DevOps (Chef).

    Rails, RefineryCMS, Spree, ThinkingSphinx, PhoneGap, Ember.js

  • "I had a pleasure of working with Michael for a year remotely. We worked on a project [Dotpedia] and he was responsible for maintaining and to continue to develop the backend system in Ruby on Rails. Given the different time zones, we were able to collaborate well together and communication was not a problem.

    His abilities and knowledge in DevOps are vast and I have learned a lot from him while also taking interest in the subject myself. He really is the expert in providing system and software solutions for any project to operate efficiently and scale properly.

    It’s hard to find someone who is really passionate about technology and software solutions and I’m glad to have worked with him and look forward to working again together on future projects."

    Walter Dumlao
    Senior UX Designer & Developer at Nano Magnetics Ltd

  • I have had the pleasure of working remotely with Michael for over a year. His ingenuity, drive and problem solving are exemplary. When Michael is given a problem, you know he will solve it, in a methodical and tidy manner. He doesn't hack code, he hones solutions. I look forward to working with him in the future.

    James Cowlishaw
    Senior Developer, Love To Ride

  • Michael's attention to detail, knowledge and professionalism made working with him a pleasure. Michael has excellent proficiency in web development and e-commerce and I hope to work with him again soon.

    Simon Sargerson
    Software Developer, SelectGroup.co.uk

  • Michael developed several innovative solutions for our eCommerce site & CMS. His work was finished to a high standard and any time I had to correspond with him he was very quick to reply and explained things in a way that I (as a non technical person) could understand. Michael really does know his stuff and lives up to his reputation as a problem solver.

    Mark Docherty
    PR & Events Executive, Autoglym UK

  • "I have worked with Michael for almost a year and will continue to do so. He's such a talented, knowledgeable and technical guy, is extremely eager to learn more and can't thank him enough for all the help he's provided. Keep it up!"

    Adam Roberts
    Digital Manager at Vivid Creative & Creative Director, GrilledPixels, UK.

Resume

Now — Sunday, 13th June 2021

Dotpedia.com — Nano Magnetics

CTO Secure Cloud Solutions

April 2017 - April 2018

Rails, C++14 (over IPC), AngularJS, Webpack, AWS, Docker, DevOps & SaaS Architecting at Scale.

Inertialbox

Founder & CTO

June 2012 - present

"Our clients come first and we build their products. Focusing on user experience and simplicity, we write code for mobile and web" — inertialbox.com

WHAT I DO
I specialise in agile development of responsive apps in Rails with a keen focus on business value and user experience. With a mobile-first approach, most clients with a moderate budget (such as startups looking for rapid-prototyping of MVPs) are recommended to take the responsive app approach, expanding to native mobile applications, connecting to the main site via carefully crafted APIs.

Having shipped apps for big, small, and medium-sized companies we also take fault-tolerant cloud deployment seriously and as such leverage DevOps solutions in all our production environments with some of the leading tools and technologies such as Ansible & Docker.

Our mantra is to ship-it-fast with best TDD/BDD practices and CI (Continuous Integration) aiding in minimising bugs and keeping technical debt to a minimum.

RATES & BOOKING
I offer design, architecture, and development services for US$100 - $200/hour for consultancy work. I am open to offering a competitive rate for long-term engagements, those typically lasting beyond 2-months.

Your development time is not confirmed until the minimum has been received and we've both signed my contract, and other contractual matters are arranged (such as NDAs etc). We rely on satisfied clients and repeat projects and therefore always do our utmost in ensuring your expectations are exceeded, every time.

"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur."
---- Red Adair, Firefighter.. for oil wells

Insurance Startup — (Alpha) MVP for Launch & AWS Architecture

CTO Inertialbox

November 2016 - March 2017

Node.js/Express, Javascript/ES6, Promises (Bluebird.js), Gulp, Docker & AWS.

GPLink.ie — MVP & AWS Stack.

CTO Inertialbox

April 2016 - November 2016

Ruby on Rails, Geocoder, ElasticSearch, Redis & AWS OpsWorks.

Research Group (Under NDA), Yorkshire, United Kingdom

CTO Inertialbox

August 2016 - February 2017

Android (Native) SDK, Retrofit, Eventbus.

The client's organisation approached us with an iOS app for iPad (under Beta) and wanted the same app replicated for Android.

The training tool developed was fairly substantial, with over 60+ views, we tailored these for 600dp/720dp mdpi tablet devices.

Retrofit was used to interface with the client's backend API for authenticated user login; Furthermore, the training tool also contained multiple forms that allow persisting data to the local SQLite DB and allowing users to share the form as a PDF for printing or via email.

Dansk Orienterings-Forbund

CTO Inertialbox

April 2016 - August 2016

Ruby on Rails, RefineryCMS, Ansible, DigitalOcean, AWS.

Contracted as a referral for specialist work with RefineryCMS and to assist in upgrading to a newer version of Rails.

DevOps work including moving to a bespoke Ansible based-stack on Digital Ocean, along with improvements.

Stembolt

Senior Software Developer (Remote)

October 2015 - January 2016

We Build Scalable Web and eCommerce Software Applications, Leveraging Ruby on Rails and Solidus (the future of the Spree open source project).

Solidus -- "An open source, eCommerce application for high volume retailers. Built with Ruby on Rails, this mountable engine provides a scalable, stable, and highly customisable platform for online commerce"

White Space Central Limited

Consulting Senior Rails Developer (Remote)

November 2013 - September 2015

Responsible for full lifecycle development of web-related projects, including full-stack Rails CMS & eCommerce apps, and Developer Operations (DevOps) for cloud-based deployment, maintenance, and management.

Daily responsibilities include:

Scoping: Jobs from clients are internally scoped and estimated; these vary from features, to complete overhauls, or bootstrapping new applications.

Development: Involves feature development, bug fixing, bootstrapping new applications, overhauling legacy Rails 2.x CMS/eCommerce apps, integration of responsive frontend markup, and implementing all Javascript aspects from AJAX/PJAX to ES6 Promises, and client-side JS such as Backbone & Ember.js.

Responsive frontend work involves SASS updates, with a mobile-first approach for media-queries, with Sprockets (Asset Pipeline) and build-tools such as Grunt/Gulp.

Domain-modelling and working with databases, caches, background jobs and full-text search are part of the development process, as well as managing data (state) between production and staging app environments.

eCommerce: There’s a high focus in eCommerce value delivery to our customers involving aspects such as payment gateway integrations with SagePay and implementations with Spree or bespoke. These apps are API heavy integrating with warehouse services via Microsoft Dynamics NAV (SOAP) or Opera (XML).

DevOps: Application deployment via existing Opscode Chef infrastructure, developing and upgrading cookbooks, and rolling out new applications. Git hooks, AWS services are examples of tools and services used.