Welcome to the web based CV of Sinéad O’Brien. I am a Canadian Born, Irish bred Software Engineer. Not long before Christmas of 08 I returned to Ireland having spent the previous 4 years living and working in Montreal, Canada.

So far I’ve managed to clock up approximately 5 years in software development. I am a passionate developer who cares about the product she is working. Having personally seen the huge improvements that agile methodologies, OOD design and excellent management can bring to a development project I am a definite advocate, and at times evangelist of following best practice guidelines. Some developers say they like a challenge, for me it is a requirement. At present I am working with a small team of developers at CarrierWeb in Dublin.

Prior to this I was involved in the financial sector working with both Canada and the U.S’s larges payment processing companies Cardex and Pivotal Payments. Here my duties included project management, porting functionality between systems and debating who would win in the battle of Ninja’s versus pirates. Some of the more interesting projects involved porting a billing system and dealing with our off-site development team in Toronto.

While working in the social networking sector at Mate1.com I was privileged to have a number of interesting projects related to face-finding and matchmaking optimization. In 2005 Mate1 was ranked the 5th fasted growing online company. When I left they could fairly boast over 7 million members!

All of my experience has been working alone or with small teams, anywhere from 1 to 10 developers. I enjoy working with open-source technologies. My technical skills range from solid programming skills in Perl, Mod_Perl, Python, PHP and SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL and MSSQL) to strong experience in all of the standard client side technologies (HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, XPATH, XML, etc). I also possess an innate ability to rapidly acquire new skills and languages.

I received my honors degree Bachelor of Computer Engineering from the University of Limerick. My final year thesis - the design and implementation of a fully functional reverse auction - received the highest marks award-able.