Lex Robinson

I am a multi-disciplinary engineer with over 10 years of experience in a variety of environments, languages and paradigms. I am quick to adapt to new situations and enjoy learning how things work and showing others. In my experience the best way to learn the intricacies of a system is to teach someone else, so I often help new starters get set up and mentor more junior programmers as they challenge my inherent assumptions.

Programming skills

• Extensive full stack web development experience with React in Typescript on the front and Django in Python on the back using PostgreSQL, with past experience with NodeJS and Go using MySQL
• Additional knowledge of big data processing with PySpark, API hardening techniques and devops with Terraform
• Past experience with low level programming in raw networking, embedded processors, multithreading/concurrency and direct OpenGL graphics manipulation

Employment History

• Lyst (2017-2022) Senior Engineer — Started as an engineer looking after backend services and rapidly became a main point of contact for other teams. Promoted to senior and loaned out to other teams to provide knowledge and engineering support when needed, helping with a variety of both frontend and backend projects such as:

  • Architecting and building a greenfield project for tracking brand performance across the platform
  • Helping migrate the website away from a home grown web framework to React & Typescript
  • Migrating a variety of data processing services to a unified data lake using AWS Glue
  • Architecting and overseeing a replacement high reliability financial data pipeline that integrates and validates disparate data from many sources into a single unified reporting platform
• Smarkets (2015 - 2017): Engineer — Extensive refactor of a legacy web system, formed a 5 person team that built a new mobile-first site using React & Typescript
• Playgen (2012 - 2015): Technical Director — Rapidly promoted as the company grew, overseeing 6 developers and managing 10 successful large projects in a mix of EU research programs and commercial contracts
• Freelance (2008-2012): Various video game related contracts

Education

• Queen Mary, University of London (2012) BEng Hons, Computer Engineering
  Hybrid degree of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering disciplines focusing on creating working products

Personal Projects & Interests

I have always been interested in games and have built many of my own, from making a virtual tabletop RPG to play with friends during lockdown to helping set up and run a megagame to writing a large number of video game mods.

I try to put as many of my projects – both game and conventional – on my GitHub profile which includes things such as the BASIC interpreter I wrote using a phone and a physical printout of the ECMA-55 spec, a Garry’s Mod mod with nearly half a million subscribers and an attempted remake of the game Wolfenstein 3D.

I also help out at the various makerspaces around London where I previously helped build a spaceship simulator into an abandoned caravan and am currently learning metalwork at the Society of Model and Experimental Engineers in the hopes of building a real coal burning model steam ship that I can take to the Victoria Model Steamboat Club in Victoria Park.

In what spare time I have remaining I read a lot of weird books, which has led to me learning COBOL, Erlang, Rust and x86 assembly language with my current book teaching me about low level optimisation techniques applied to high level languages for a variety of processor architectures.

For a PDF version (with contact information), please contact me using the link below.