Will Smart

About Me

I’m a highly experienced full-stack developer with a passion for innovative problem-solving through code. I bring a rare combination of energy, creativity, and research-based rigour to the work I do. I love to learn, explain tricky concepts in plain English, and treat people well.


I'm looking for a new challenge in a socially responsible company.

Key Skills

  • Leading challenging projects in a variety of business settings.

  • Native mobile development, web server/frontend, infrastructure management/maintenance, and electronic design.

  • Analytical thinker, with a PhD in machine learning

  • Led projects in Javascript, Java, Obj-C/Swift, Terraform

  • Completed solo and collaborative projects in Ruby, Typescript, C#, C++, C, PHP

Career History

Senior Developer

Melon Health | Jan 2014 – Feb 2020


Melon (formerly Social Code) creates evidence-based apps that support people’s physical and mental health, and helps them to collaboratively set, track and achieve their goals.


Lead developer on the first generation of Melon’s iOS apps. This fun, fast-paced project vastly extended what Melon’s small existing app could do, and boosted its functionality. Using a flexible, easy to manipulate module structure, a central white-label codebase was specialized as five different apps on the Apple store. This helped Melon to experiment and grow a critical early stage.

Lead developer in the creation of Terraform code to mirror our infrastructure, moving its management to a reliable, peer-reviewable process.


Other roles:

  • Rails development

  • Web frontend development in react, pojs, elm.

  • Day to day server maintenance and troubleshooting

  • Day to day management of the cloud infrastructure on AWS

  • Native android development


I also:

Championed knowledge-sharing with a range of colleagues - from marketers to graphic designers, nurses, doctors, testers and other developers.

Gave regular technical presentations to upskill the wider team.

Senior Programmer

Kitomba Salon & Spa Software Full-time | Jul 2012 – Dec 2013

Back-end development (PHP) of the company’s first public-facing piece of software. This prototype was crucial in helping Kitomba decide whether they would diversify their business and offer the public a real-time, user-friendly booking system.

Academia

PhD (Machine Learning)

Victoria University of Wellington | 2005 - 2011

  • This formative degree saw me design a powerful optimization technique, allowing previously impossible analyses of sets of small programs. The result was four fiendishly simple core algorithms, an efficient implementation including a new general purpose genetic programming engine shared for use by other researchers, two papers presented overseas, and one very large book.

MSc (Comp Sci - Machine Learning)

Victoria University of Wellington | 2004

BSc (1st class hons) (Comp Sci)

Victoria University of Wellington | 2003


Skills advanced through all this graduate study:

  • Learned advanced Comp Sci topics from experts

  • Public speaking through multiple top-tier overseas conference presentations

  • Conceptualization. Isolating the essence of overgrown ideas

  • Communication of tricky ideas in plain language

  • Technical skills including visualization including realtime raytracing of genetic programs in direct X, nuanced algorithmic code, and using C++ to run large scale machine-learning and data-mining experiments over a 150 node computing cluster

  • Self-starting, self-motivating, self-managing.

Postdoctoral fellow. Software developer

Centre for eResearch, University of Auckland Full-time | 2010 – 2012

This was a results-focused role in a cutting-edge academic-for-industry setting.

  • Lead developer of Alfred, a stand-alone data-mining/data-visualisation tool (Java) created for the energy company Chevron. Alfred allowed Chevron’s researchers to view and explore the many facets of a complex research dataset. I also led the final demonstration to Chevron executives in Texas.

  • Developed the Semantic Data Land Cover website. This site visualised New Zealand land-use changes over time by allowing historic GIS maps to be overlayed and visually compared despite working from markedly different land-use categories.

Other Certifications

Certificate in Small Business Management

Te Whananga o Aoteoroa | 2017

HIPAA Awareness Training

2019