James Ball

I worked with a small team to develop the UK government's Homes for Ukraine platform. This has helped ensure the safe resettlement of over 128,000 Ukrainian refugees in the UK.

I created advanced user workflows for entity resolution, allowing for data deduplication, and cleaned-up and pipelined poor-quality data from disparate sources.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, my work was client-facing, allowing me to develop my communication skills not just within my team but also externally.

Netcraft specialises in finding and taking down websites that impersonate other companies. They currently perform takedowns for three of the ten most phished companies on the internet.

Perl was the language I used the most, along with JavaScript, MySQL, PHP, and other technologies such as Puppet.

In 2020, I worked as part of a research team, and uncovered new scams and phishing sites including Microsoft support call and gift card scams.

In 2021, I automatically detected and took down telephone scams, spoke to customers about newly discovered covid scams, and worked on sales for web scams to companies worth over $400B.

Regex and Bash were skills that were heavily developed throughout my time at Netcraft; Regex is used all over Netcraft for classifying malicious sites.

My communicative and documenting skills were exercised when writing technical reports about the programs I have been writing and their purpose.

thirtyone:eight is a charity that specialises in introducing child-protection policies in churches and offering DBS checks to many UK dioceses.

I worked as part of the IT department; tooling using C#, managing databases using MySQL, maintaining IT systems using Azure, and fixing staff PCs.

The redevelopment of the company website was my largest project; spanning over multiple months, working with multiple developers, and closely communicating with the marketing department.

I heavily used JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, and worked with multiple web frameworks, including Angular and Vue.

Another large project I undertook was the development of a hardware auditing program that gathered information about staff PCs.

Once the data is gathered, it is sent via JSON to a server program that inserts the data into the company database. This required heavy knowledge of Azure, C#, and .NET Entity Framework.