Andy Huang

Technical Lead

As part of UK Elections, electors may apply for voting arrangements. These include setting up postal and proxy voting, obtaining a voter authority certificate (VAC), and registering as an overseas elector (OE).

Hundreds of thousands of applications for these voting arrangements come in through digital and paper routes every month, all of which require checks against other government services, making it a challenge for local authorities to process without the support of digital tooling.

Andy led the team of ten developers through a substantial refactor, while continuing to deliver high-impact features. They ensured delivery against tight deadlines, by supporting developers through clear direction, technical guidance, and getting stuck in to code, review, or test whenever needed.

Impact:

Delivered refactor with minimal impact on uptime and zero impact on external intergations, allowing improvements to be implemented across postal, proxy, VAC, and OE application processing, reducing implementation cost by 40%.

Simultaneously delivered high-value improvements to the processing flow, saving tens of thousands of hours of work for electoral registration officers every month.

Technologies used:

Kotlin, Spring, MySQL, TypeScript, Next.js, Terraform, AWS, SQS, Github Actions

Coaching training:

Identified a need for communication and coaching training. Wrote and facilitated training sessions on coaching for colleagues, improving the quality of role mentorship and line management.

Improving technical capability:

Ran events such as a homelab hackathon to develop ops skills and improve knowledge around infrastucture engineering.

Director of Digital Curriculum

Designed and crafted curriculum and learner experiences for Software Engineering apprenticeships.

Designed hiring requirements, processes, and tests for devops and software engineering trainers.

Delivered insight sessions for business stakeholders, to communicate the benefits of upskilling teams in DevOps, and to tap into the apprenticeship market.

Impact:

Achieved a 100% pass rate on the software and devops courses, with 50% obtaining merits or above, and 25% achieving distinction grades.

Developed and maintained relationships with several clients, found opportunities for selling custom courses and training outside of apprenticeship material.

Technologies used:

Docker, Microsoft Azure, Terraform, Python, GitHub Actions, Java, C#, Javascript, TypeScript

Trainer (DevOps Course)
Head of Curriculum (Software Course)

Worked with fellow trainers to create, maintain, and deliver the DevOps curriculum and material.

Led the software team in delivering the first cohorts of apprentices on the new SD4 IFA v1.1 standard, and in communicating the changes in the new standard to colleagues, learners, and clients.

Technologies used:

Docker, Microsoft Azure, Terraform, Python, GitHub Actions, Java, C#, Javascript, TypeScript

Technical Lead

On the support team, Andy enabled junior and mid-level developers in managing and maintaining projects for a variety of clients and projects, including:

• DLUHC: Register to Vote
• Flood Forecasting Centre
• Redburn Digital

Impact:

Enhanced the capabilities of a multi-project, multi-technology team by mentoring and upskilling junior and intermediate developers to tackle challenging and unique tasks.

Documented, updated and decommissioned legacy applications and processes in a high-profile environment, discovering and distributing vital knowledge, to safely lower infrastructure and maintenence costs.

Maximised the effectiveness of time and materials for clients with smaller budgets by triaging and prioritising high-impact tickets.

Technologies used:

C#, ASP.NET MVC, PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails, AWS, React, TypeScript, Docker

Full stack Engineer

Andy implemented iOS/Android mobile apps for LNER, providing travellers with journey planning, live information and other useful functionality. They also architected and implemented the underlying backend which integrates several upstream services, some of which were a challenge to integrate due to age and lack of documentation.

They developed across all aspects of this high-impact service, from native mobile development, to server-side TypeScript, to the infrastructure on AWS.

Database Engineer

Backend Developer