Nicholas Mann

Experience

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  Maplin Electronics

  Feb 2013 - May 2015

  My role at Maplin was more than just restocking the shelves and working the tills. I was required to provide assistance to customers on all manner of things. From working out what the best cable was for a job to calculating component values for a circuit. I have used my knowledge from university to help people size up a solar arrays and batteries for sheds, motor homes and boats. On one occasion I spent 90 minutes helping a customer design an electric bike. My wide ranging knowledge and problem solving skills quickly made me the person to talk to regarding many topics Show less

  • Store team leader

    Dec 2014 - May 2015

  • Sales Representative

    Feb 2013 - Dec 2014
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  NPAE Precision Astro Engineering

  Jan 2015 - now

  Co-Founder & Head designer

  I am a co-founder and lead designer/engineer of Nottingham Precision Astro Engineering. This involves creating and refining new product designs, communicating with manufactures and retailers, interacting with customers and honestly a little bit of everything else needed to operate a small business.I have to work to tight self imposed deadlines and requirements as well as take into consideration the timescales of those I will be working with on the products.The design work involves: creation of new idea expanding on them using CAD Producing prototypes though various methods including additive manufacture Analysing the prototypes and improving the design Then iterating until a final product is ready to put into productionIts then my responsibility to liaise with the network of retailers which we have created over several years to inform them of the new product and why they should stock it. At the same time I am in communication with various manufactures to ensure that the components meet our standards. Once the parts arrive I assemble and prepare the products for sale.I also maintain our own webstore and most of our customer facing media such as videos, flyers and posters.www.npae.net Show less

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  FDM Group

  Jan 2018 - Sept 2021

  Software Developer

  Having competed the .Net training at the Leeds FDM academy I am currently placed with a client. In this and previous roles I am working on software development including programming in several languages, testing and deployment. I have made contributions to opensource projects, created tools and utilities to aid my team and others in their efforts and always been willing to explore new technologies to improve the work being done by the team.While at Hastings direct I was involved in many hackathons which resulted in the creation of several prototypes for new services and demonstrators of new technologies. I created a toolbox application and xml based scripting language, using Java, C#, Node.js, React and electron. I recognised while working there that many people had many good ideas for small tools or projects which would improve their workflow but what was happening was that people were making them for themselves and they were barely being expanded on or shared with other teams. So for one of the hackathons I created a React and electron application inside which other tools could be easily built and deployed across the organisation. I also built several example tools, documentation and gave presentations to demonstrate how to create inside the toolbox. These demo tools allow team members to track tickets with desktop notifications when a linked ticket is completed, record video demos more easily for product and presentations, run automation against the frontend and I had begun work on a terminal tool which would allow many terminals in grouped tabs.I worked with React, Java, Node.js, C#, Angular and a few other languages and tools Show less

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  HM Land Registry

  Feb 2020 - Jul 2022

  Software Developer

  I have been an active & engaged member of a HMLR delivery team working using the Kanban agile methodology, while in this role I have engaged within the three amigos process discussing requirements with the BA & test offering suggestions & seeking clarity to ensure we have a clear set of requirements before bringing the work into the refined backlog & all the requirements are clearly laid out & testable, for myself at unit level & for the testers in the higher regions. My role included providing live support, prioritising my scheduled work against live fixes, providing estimations of fix time & testing requirements & liaising with product to gain a clear sight of the priority of the support so I can identify potential delivery problems & ensure my delivery manager is notified with enough time to ensure the correct prioritisation of decisions are made.I joined the team as a tester & I used that experience to guide the creation of an automation test framework. This involved analysing the current system & the test coverage, identifying the weaknesses, architecting a new system, presenting the solution to the team & guiding the new testers in its use. I built on the existing LR skeleton. I am currently working on it leading 2 other testers so that once it is completed, they will be able to utilise & expand on it without needing my input.The work being done by the team is source controlled using git/gitlab. As part of my interaction with the code I have to create, merge & delete new branches, promote changes through environments & deploy to production. All code is unit, integration tested & peer reviewed. I have had the opportunity to introduce team members to programming concepts & I have tried to expand on best practices. For example, A recent piece of work I was able to introduce the team to the concept of reflection & demonstrated how it would work well for the particular issue we were working on. That code that is now in production. Show less

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  Capgemini Invent

  Jul 2022 - now

  Senior Consultant

  First Project at Capgemini was at DWP. Nicholas was the tech lead on a greenfield project. He joined the team as they were nearing the end of Alpha and worked closely with the researchers, architect and BA’s to plan out the development. Following that Nicholas built a team of developers and testers to start the work which was brought to near completion before moving off the project. The project involved use of the CASA framework alongside Javascript and Java.