Patrick Devane

Performance Engineer

• Auckland, New Zealand
• LinkedIn
• GitHub

Profile

I am a problem solver. I relish breaking down complex problems into clean solutions. I abhor inefficiencies in systems whether they be code or process and I never shy away from a challenge. I love bringing others on board with my excitement for technical and non-technical solutions and possibilities.

Skills and Competencies

• Deep RDBMS knowledge - Highly technical SQL knowledge and a proven track record of solving performance problems in the database layer through query tuning and data management
• Wide ranging technology proficiencies including
• Back-end technologies - Python 3, CherryPy, Bokeh, Pandas, NumPy, JuPyter Notebooks, SQL, C#, REST API design
• Front-end technologies - React, Javascript, Typescript, HTML, CSS and React libraries MateriaUI, React Query, React Table, Nivo Charts, Prettier, Vite
• Windows server technologies - IIS, WSGI, Windows services, Windows server administration
• Deployment technologies - Containerisation principles, Docker, Octopus Deploy
• Cloud technologies - Azure - Administration, Application Development, DevOps, Virtual Machines, Scale Sets, Databases, Functions
• Microsoft technologies - Office, Teams, PowerBI, Power Automate, Logic Apps
• Workflow methodologies - Git, Agile, Kanban
• Wide ranging tool familiarity - Knowledge of Apache JMeter, Tableau, SentryOne Plan Explorer, SSMS, PerfView, PerfMon + WMI, AppDynamics. I have also built custom tools using windows batch, PowerShell and python
• Determined learner - I am constantly learning about new techniques and technologies and the ways that they could benefit my work
• Specialising generalist - I strive to know a little about a lot, enabling me to be an informed and active contributor to discussions
• Excellent communicator - Years of university debating and stand-up comedy means I am clear and concise in written communication and at ease with presentations and public speaking
• Initiative taker - My drive to improve things means I assist with company initiatives like leading the QA Guild and participating in the Engineering Experience Council to improve organisation processes
• Project management - I successfully led a mission coordinating multiple teams to create and implement the first shared continuous integration cloud environment for the engineering organisation
• Helpful - Common performance review feedback from people inside and outside of my team speak highly of my willingness to help and create learning opportunities for those I’m working with

Experience

Performance Engineer, Vista Entertainment Solutions Limited, 2021 - present

I work with a variety of stakeholders across the business to reduce the performance risk of any new software delivered.

• Maintain and improve a custom performance testing system to simulate multiple users of a product performing various actions concurrently and record multiple performance metrics in the application and database layer for reporting, analysis and comparison
• Designed and implemented performance tests for multiple products with appropriate pacing, randomness and data consistency design considerations
• Overhauled our internal performance test management system, greatly expanding on its features sets and analysis capabilities
• Analyse and provide feedback on performance test results to advise on current performance risk and provide guidance on reducing it further where needed
• Designed and implemented pipelines for scheduled deployment and performance testing of multiple products
• Worked with product teams to increase their confidence and capability in proactively writing performance tests and reviewing performance test results for product features and bug fixes

Automation Test Engineer, Vista Entertainment Solutions Limited, 2021

I assisted increasing the coverage of automated tests across several products and REST APIs

• Coordinated smoke and regression testing for several products to green light customer releases
• Worked with developers and business analysts to ensure testability was built into the design of new product feature work
• Assisted customer services with product operation inquiries and customer incidents
• Identified critical security and performance bugs in existing code and implemented automated testing to mitigate their risk in future releases
• Created a repository of API definitions with Postman. Empowering customer service teams to check data flows as part of incident reports without engineer intervention
• Led the testing community in my product area to surface bottlenecks and improve testing processes

Software Services Analyst, Vista Entertainment Solutions Limited, 2019 - 2021

I was a member of the customer services escalation team. My team regularly received customer incidents that had high impact and high urgency. These were complex problems across a range of products and often involved accessing customer environments to triage, troubleshoot and lease resolutions between the engineering department and the customer.

• Created a performance incident management system to keep stakeholders informed of incident resolution progress. This was built on top of Microsoft’s Power Platform and integrated with the incident management database and Microsoft Teams
• Created automated troubleshooting tools used by customer services to diagnose and collect metrics from multiple systems during performance incidents using SQL queries and batch scripts
• Created PowerBI dashboards to track service department KPIs over time. This also required re-designing parts of the data warehouse due to scaling issues and re-writing custom DAX queries
• Worked with developers to increase the performance of some report-generating stored procedures. Reducing logical reads and elapsed execution time

Education

• MSc in Physics, University of Otago, 2018
• Post Graduate Diploma of Science in Physics, University of Otago, 2017
• BSc in Physics, University of Otago, 2015 - 2016

Certifications

• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
• Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Scientist Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate


• Microsoft Certified: Solutions Expert - Data Management and Analytics
• Microsoft Certified: Solutions Associate SQL 2016 Database Development

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