Steve Lacey

Contact Details

Steve Lacey @stevelacey http://stevelacey.net

Web Developer steve at steve lacey dot net

Bristol
UK

Profile

I'm a web developer based in Bristol, UK, building interesting websites and native mobile applications at Wired Media. I also recently graduated with first class honours from BSc Web Design at the University of the West of England.

I have been involved in the web industry for about 8 years and I am proficient in an ever-growing range of both client & server-side technologies. I enjoy building highly scalable websites/applications and playing with emerging technologies.

Experience

Web Developer at Wired Media

2009 - Present

Since 2009 I have worked at Bristol-based web development / digital agency Wired Media both on placement as part of my degree and post-grad.

Whilst working at Wired Media I have gained experience using:

PHP frameworks (Symfony & CakePHP) to build highly scalable websites and applications.
The in-house content management and ecommerce system Wired CMS.
Extending the in-house CMS as a wedding planning and management product.
Building iOS, Android and BlackBerry applications with Titanium and PhoneGap.
Version control (Git & Subversion).
Linux & Windows server maintenance on local machines and the Rackspace Cloud.
Puppet for automating the provisioning, patching, and configuration of operating system and application components across infrastructure.
Integrating various systems with payment gateways including Sage, Google, Paypal and NoChex.
Working with numerous REST & SOAP API's spanning from social media to integrations with till-checkout systems.

Peer Assisted Learning Leader at UWE

2008 - 2009

During my second year studying at UWE I ran weekly one hour sessions for first year students as part of the Peer Assisted Learning scheme. The sessions covered the basics of frontend development and PHP for database and API interactions.

The sessions I ran received praise from students, staff and peers alike, and through them my confidence was boosted and knowledge solidified.

As part of the scheme I was trained in the subject areas of:

Body posture & voice training.
Assertiveness.
Engaging the audience.

The scheme helped me improve my communication and presentational skills- key ones, that have been useful on a daily basis in my professional career.

For more information check out the PAL website, my PAL session content and the subsequent years of PAL leadership that have led on from my original sessions: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012.

Web Developer

2004 - Present

I’ve worked with a variety of different clients including web hosting companies, affiliate marketing websites and small businesses.
Client work varies from individual PHP scripts e.g. for retrieving data from TradeDoubler, to full websites with content management capabilities.

Education

University of the West of England

2007 - 2011

BSc (Hons) Web Design

First-class honours degree (78.5%)
Year 1: 80%, Year 2: 76% & Year 3: 79%.

Toot Hill College

2005 - 2007

A-Levels

Business (C), IT (D), Physics (E)

AS-Levels

Accounting (E)

Toot Hill School

2000 - 2005

10 GCSE's

A-C including Maths, English and Science.

Skills

Building cool things in

Client-side technologies and PHP are like second languages to me, as are a variety of frameworks including Symfony, Cake and Zend.

Have experience using

Maintaining, bug fixing, borrowing modules from and upgrading.

Hacking with

You'll often find me hacking things together in Ruby and Node.

Wanting to do more

I'm particularly interested in getting more into developing full websites and applications in Ruby, Node and Python, and frameworks like Rails, Sinatra and Django.

People say things like

An inspiration to both his teachers and classmates, Steve gets the web, and the concepts of building applications that make best use of the networked, data-driven aspects of the internet, an asset to any company that he works for. - Dan Dixon
Great to work with - Steve relates well to people, not just technology. - Paul Hulbert
We're proud to have Steve on our scheme as he's shown committment, responsibility and pro-activity. No doubt he'll be an invaluable asset to any organisation. - Fiorella Bettin
Steve's a thoughtful and patient teacher, he provided a fantastic quality of support for students on the course and was always dependable. It's great to see that someone with such a large amount of technical knowledge is so keen to share it with others. - Carl Wood