Sam Leicester

Strengths 💪

Strategic leader

Focused on business objectives and customer needs

Mapping realistic deliverables to keep things moving forward

Think on my feet

Excellent knowledge of array of technologies with their strengths

Adaptable to changing requirements and finding ways to stay on track

Quick learner

Can quickly learn new technologies and frameworks

Intuitive mapping of strengths and weaknesses

Energetic

Thrive under pressure

Love working with a team, encouraging participation from all

Natural rhythm to deliver value regularly

Achievements 🥇

Energy management platform - ista Energy Solutions Limited

ista is one of the world's leading companies providing energy services for greater energy efficiency in buildings - especially apartment buildings and commercial properties.

Working to uplift their energy monitoring platform MinuteView.

• Ensured application was security compliant following a a 3rd party security audit
• Migrated from an old bespoke PHP framework to Laravel 8, upgrading through to Laravel 11 and PHP 8.3
• Worked with the wider team to share knowledge and adopt into framework
• Data integration with Enedis, the main operator of the public electricity distribution network in France.

Accessibility reports, reimagined

Having worked with accessibility requirements with public bodies for a number of years, and dealing with Excel reports that were long winded, repeatative and difficult to follow, and not understood by managers we sort to change this and make something better

• Originally built on Laravel 8, now runs on Laravel 11
• Scalable with use of queue system that runs jobs in the background
• Runs real browser accessibility tests using Node.JS and Selenium
• Abstracted test runner interface to also support running through Browserless.io

Digital Self-service platform for 200k students with The Open University

Worked very closely within the The Open University over the last 8 years, moving from a collection of disperate websites to producing together a Help Centre that enables students to quickly find answers.

• Moved from bespoke framework to Laravel 4.2, with continual upgrade to Laravel 8
• Continuous Improvement and Deployment (CI/CD) through Microsoft Azure platform
• Established automated testing to build confidence within software development
• Delivered a powerful component library powered by Tailwind CSS - making changes easier while significatly reducing the size of CSS
• Handled large data migrations, including moving from HTML content to structured content within Prismic Headless CMS
• Developed and maintained high standard of supported packages to Open Source
• Liaised with central departments: Marketing, Information Security, IT.

Slick mobile food ordering platform Forage for Graticule

Worked with Graticule to develop a mobile food ordering platform that enables users to order food from their favourite restaurants, and personalise their experience with a unique menu.

• Delivered a slick ordering process on both desktop and mobile
• Integrated with multiple payment gateways; Stripe, Paypal, Barclays ePDQ, SumUp and Revolut
• Extensive use of Livewire and Alpine.js

Consolidated CMS experience powering 200 sites, The Open University

Worked with The Open University to consolidate their Drupal CMS, moving to a system that allowed sites to share a common theme and components; driving a more better experience for users while significantly lowering the maintenance overhead. Originally produced for 5 large faculty websites, it now powers most subsites within the platform (over 200).

• Consolidated multiple site specific themes and packages to common functionality on a standardised theme and set of common packages
• Worked together with Communications and Marketing departments to develop to their requirements, providing in-depth training sessions so the platform could be supported internally
• Over delivered - originally just designed to handle faculty site developments, it now powers many of the university websites on their Drupal platform