Adam Hill

CTO and Full-Stack Software Engineer

General info
CTO and Full-Stack Software Engineer
Launceston, Tasmania
I help online startup companies actually start up, delivering them kicking and screaming into the world wide web.

Rapid prototyping and full-stack web development are where I shine with expertise all the way down the stack - anything in Cloud Computing, Ruby on Rails and quality front-end work in HTML / JavaScript / CSS.

I've been freelancing full-time since 2004 and love the freedom along with the amazing variety of work: development, design, copywriting, project management, SEO, consulting, business strategy, marketing, tech support...
Experience
Oct 2016 - Sep 2018
Top-20 Engineer at Gigster
I got hired as an engineer at Gigster to do what I do best - code like a beast and help deliver business-critical products for tech start-ups and established businesses alike. Oftentimes these products are the core of the companies themselves and I take pride in my work despite the NDAs that prevent me from saying the actual names of gigs I've worked on specifically... But I can say I've made:





health-tracking software for schools, big-data backup order tracking for an IT firm, a cooking community app, a US-based resumé builder / employer-employee matching system, an Australian-based space-for-rent system (like AirBnB but for any space), a large component of a suite of apps that handle casual worker management, an SMS-based survey system and a trio of apps for a company that looks like it could be Uber for construction.

I'm currently ranked in the top 20 of about 400 developers.
Low Head, Tasmania
Feb 2004 - Present
Director
Advanced Design Online
I started picking up small freelancing web development jobs in 2002 while I was still studying at UTas (Bachelor of Computing, graduated 2003). I kept running this side business whilst both working and studying from 2004 to 2006. Since graduating in mid-2006 with Masters in Computing onwards I have been effectively working ADO full-time as a premium provider of custom Content Management Systems written in Ruby on Rails.

I have never advertised, and I have always received jobs through word of mouth. This has been enough over the years to employ several people when the workload has been more than I can handle. Nowadays I am a sole trader and work very closely with and subcontract to incredibly talented people: designers James and Tom and systems administrator Aaron.
Australia
Apr 2013 - Present
Tech Co-Founder
Always Golfing was conceived in August 2012 by Ben Jones, Nick Waldron and myself with the motto ‘more golf. more often.’ Always Golfing has created this website with the primary function of providing casual golfers with the opportunity to access two for the price of one golf vouchers for use at participating clubs nationwide. Officially founded in April 2013, we're currently signing up clubs Australia-wide after our initial Tasmanian trial.
Sep 2012 - Present
Tech Co-Founder
Rodrigo Conde approached me to develop a social network of collectors. Being an avid collector of several types of things myself, I was instantly passionate about the project. We've been working through the design phase of TCR over the past several months and are looking forward to kicking on with development and the beta launch.

How about you; are you a collector? Of absolutely anything? Of course you are! Soon you'll be able to browse collections of anything you're interested in and connect with other collectors.

Keep an eye out for this one!
Launceston, TAS
Jun 2010 - Present
Team Member
I formed a small freelance team with graphic designers James and Tom: "Mastodon". This is not a business as such, merely a team: whoever gets the contract can subcontract to the other team members if and when they need. This means that clients get the best possible products delivered from us combining all of our strengths.

We have been working really well together - check out the MathsRepublic web application (www.mathsrepublic.com.au), the new BioClinical Services website (www.bioclinicalservices.com.au), Fahan school website (www.fahan.tas.edu.au), the new Forestry Services International website (www.forestrysi.com) and the Tasmanian Principals Association website (www.tpa.org.au).
Launceston, TAS
Jan 2005 - Nov 2012
Web Developer
I took over as the web guy at the University of Tasmania's School of Nursing and Midwifery (http://www.snm.utas.edu.au/) at the beginning of 2005. I helped upgrade them to the new design at the time and wrote several dynamic areas.

I also started working at the University Department of Rural health (http://www.ruralhealth.utas.edu.au/) in April of 2006 to work on the UDRH external website, newsletter and start working on an internal UTas Ruby on Rails system: the Patient Partner Program (http://www.patientpartnerprogram.com.au/). The PPP is a program run by the Launceston Clinical School (http://www.medicine.utas.edu.au/schools/lcs/) and manages bookings of student doctors, doctor tutors and chronically ill patients in the community to help dramatically increase the amount of cases students get to see hence becoming more experienced. This program has expanded to Hobart and has recently (late 2012) been licensed to the Monash showing no signs of slowing down.
Highlight Projects
After my many years of maths tutoring, along with my obvious software development talents and experience writing complex scalable survey applications and responsive web applications, I was contracted to develop MathsRepublic.

It's an enormous system designed to extend Australian grade 5-10 students beyond the mathematics classroom. Just launched at the end of October 2013.

I subcontracted the design of the public & students areas out to the venerable James Stackhouse and our combined talents as always are meshing well into another world class product.
Contracted through Jaffa to take the existing Flash application and convert it to HTML5 for smartphone and tablet compatibility (especially iOS). This was a very technically challenging project but well worth it - the end result speaks for itself.

The homepage is the wall itself - this is made up of tens of thousands of Australian town names. These town names then make up massive battle names. All the town names are searchable and the battle names are clickable for more information.

There is also a "theatres of war" map with battle location clustering, which also takes you to the battle detail pages.

Everything is completely responsive and retina-compatible.
Ruby on Rails web application started in April 2006 - providing a web-based interface for the management of contact details for students, patients, doctors and users (secured access for admins and tutors). Group consultations and assessments available for each student with lots of different reports available to admins and tutors.

Has recently had a complete code rewrite in the latest framework and visual overhaul. The program has expanded from the Launceston Clinical School to also being used in Hobart and Monash has also licensed it for 2012 onwards. The system is now fully-responsive, providing assessors and coordinators a great user experience on any device from smart phones to tablets to their office computers.
Contracted by Andrea at Brands for the People to take the Balsamiq Mockups she had done and the PDF web designs from Christina Lauer to turn into a full working product.

Brands for the People has a curated community of the best designers and connects them with startup companies in need of full branding packages. BFTP also cuts back on the speculative nature of online design by restricting the number of designers pitching per project to an absolute maximum of five.

The system I created consists of four main areas; public area, administration, clients and designers areas.

Public area: sales funnel, detail pages, blog.

Client area: create projects and fill in your branding strategy, follow-up with a free consultation to analyse your project and the BFTP brand strategists will suggest designers and find any extras beyond the scope of the standard branding package. The client then chooses up to 5 designers to invite to pitch for the project. Designers then upload concepts and clients can discuss those concepts with the designers. Once the pitch process is over, a single designer is chosen and then they deliver the full package.

Designer area: update your profile, view project invitations, upload concepts and participate in project discussions about your concepts.

Administration: page & menu management, article & category management, user management, project management.
Complete website redesign, redevelopment backed by a custom Ruby on Rails 3.0 CMS to handle pages, images, files and videos, events, RSVPs, donations, news articles, multiple email newsletters, site-wide search.

Under active development under the lead of their excellent communications department continually planning new features and brainstorming ideas.
Full business branding including logo design, print work, business website design & development. Tom Bryan and I also gave the website a major rewrite and visual overhaul in mid-2012.

Their major product, the "Clinical Equipment User Manual Library" I designed and developed many years ago. In mid-2012 I gave the codebase and both the hospital and administration interfaces a major overhaul in terms of visuals and user experience. This provides secured admin access for management of brands, devices, documents using Amazon S3/Cloudfront for file storage due to 40Gb of current manuals, aiming for 100Gb by end of 2013. It also has a secured normal user area for document access – uses one-time Amazon secured URLs for manuals.
I created the Forestry Services International website in 2012. It's a fully-responsive website based on Twitter Bootstrap with some major customisations. Graphic design help from Tom Bryan to give it that slick modern feel.
MIP e-referrals
Ruby on Rails CMS to handle radiologist referrals and bookings with information flow between four different secure-login user types.
Winner of the "Most Potential to Monetize" category of the 2010 Rails Rumble (www.railsrumble.com), we won a year of premium Chargify services. Great to see that Chargify believe in our system as much as we do!

Workrz puts an interesting spin on rostering, especially for casual staff - you can either assign or invite them to shifts - all in one hit online. No more wasting hours every week making phone calls.

This project is under active development and is due for a beta launch over the next few months!
I worked with James on replacing Caliber's Flex-based bookings front-end with an HTML5 version so it's compatible with iPads, iPhones etc. My experience with Ruby on Rails made working with their existing RoR backend a breeze and is a good example of my unobstrusive javascript style and jQuery strengths.
Subdomain for each account with multiple users per account;

Grouped/tagged phonebook contacts;

Send SMS via web interface, email or API (for MS Office plugin etc);

Delayed job engine for message scheduling to avoid overload.
Project management, server, database, email and DNS setup and hosting. Rebranding and most design by James, development and design by Tom.
Page tree, news article management, file and image management within CMS (plus ~50Gb subversion library) plus full site search;

Multiple online shops within the one CMS (was based on a system I started to rival Shopify) with a full category tree, having products in multiple categories. Products can have normal & electronic product variants;

Dynamic-Flash map of Tasmania - the CMS manages regions, destinations, features at each destination and then passes that live info to the Flash map (developed by Jaffa) via XML;

Lots of Ruby scripting for bulk updates to CMS content, reports etc.
I took over existing PHP system in November 2005, supported until April 2006 when we started the new Rails CMS with page tree, asset management, event management and RSVPs, donations online, six different newsletter types (with online and email versions) each with multiple editions and multiple articles per edition. Also includes full auctions system, secured parent areas.

Showing the strength and versatility of the CMS I created, it's gone through two redesigns but still used through to 2014.
Ruby on Rails web application. Designed for either having users fill in answers online, or provide an interface for inputting answers from results on paper/email etc;

It's used by Launceston Church Grammar School http://survey.lcgs.tas.edu.au/ and Meander Valley Council http://survey.meander.tas.gov.au/

Survey management complete with multiple pages per survey, multiple questions per page, questions can be of many different types. Admin interface includes lots of AJAX with drag and drop, inline editing etc. Lots of reporting functionality including demographic builder. Seriously you wouldn't believe the power of the demographic builder search, it's so good I'm considering revamping this into it's own marketable product.
Used a custom PHP CMS I wrote to pass XML back and forth from Flash front-end (which I worked on with Jaffa). This type of system is more common now, but at it's time (2004) was amazing and one of the first of its kind, and it's still running 6 years later. It has multiple gateway implementations: Eway for Australian orders and Ogone for Euro orders.
A Ruby on Rails side project I helped develop to show a map of all your friends recent check-ins across different social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla. This project was helped by my experience in cloud computing and caching and helped me gain experience with the Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla and Google maps APIs.

Design by James and marketing by Tom.

This has since been cancelled with no future plans at this stage to revive it, but it was a fun little side project and I learned a lot from it.
Education
Launceston, Tasmania
Feb 2001 - Jun 2006
Master of Computing
In 2001, I was awarded a University of Tasmania National Undergraduate Scholarship in Computing for four full-time years of study where I commenced the Bachelor of Computing degree. I gained a broad understanding of many areas of computing including programming, project management, game design, networking and exposure to many software environments.

During the three year undergraduate course, I received a total of 17 High Distinctions, 6 Distinctions and 1 Credit and was placed on the Dean's Roll of Excellence for each year. My team came third in the Pacific region of the world-renowned ACM ICPC programming competition.

I went straight into a Bachelor of Computing with Honours degree, which I later changed to a Masters in Computing where I researched and studied robotics, functional programming, mobile and ubiquitous computing. I finished my Masters while simultaneously working six part-time jobs. I have always pushed my limits.
Launceston, Tasmania
Feb 1994 - Dec 2000
Grade 6-12
I attended SOC on scholarship from 1994 to 2000. In years 11 and 12 I studied computing, as many mathematics subjects as I possibly could, physics, chemistry and japanese. I was equal dux of the college having received a perfect TCE score of 100.0 and received the equal highest Interstate Tertiary Index score in Australia with the maximum of 99.95.
Things I am interested in (other than working my butt off for you)
Soccer / Futsal;

Swimming;

Frisbee;

Anything tech;

Motorbike riding;

Social basketball;

Rock climbing;

Xbox 360 gaming;

Bush walking;

Developing side projects!
References
Systems Administrator
Office of National Assessments
+61 2 6144 0867 (w)
Aaron.Theodore@ona.gov.au
Freelance Web Designer
+61 487 335 194
james@houseofstack.com
Patient Partner Program Coordinator
University of Tasmania
+61 408 509 970 (m)
International Marketing
Melbourne Uni
+61 438 310 880 (m)
hamishdavies@gmail.com
State Representative
Red Bull
+61 411 233 472 (m)
lucas.saunders@au.redbull.com

Owner/Operator of Hobby Link
www.hobbylink.com.au
shop@hobbylink.com.au
Tecnology Specialist - Applications
Telstra
+61 3 6323 2660 (w)
jon.deboer@team.telstra.com