Peter Pilgrim Digital CV

So you want to work with me in 2023 or beyond? Or perhaps, you are interested in a consultancy?

Let me introduce myself. I am Peter Pilgrim, a long standing software developer with achievements. I am a member of the Java Champions (you have to be chosen by others for this honour, in the style of Italian-American crime fiction “Made”).

Since October 1997, I have been writing Java programs professionally. Theseday, I still contribute to JDK 11 and hopefully JDK 17 applications, but my backgrounds goes way further back than that to C, C++, Turbo C++, Fortran 77, Borland Turbo Pascal, Standard Pascal, BBC BASIC, Research Machines Limited BASIC 380Z and 6502 assembly language programming. You see I am learnt to program as a teenager in the 1980s.

I stopped contracting in the UK in 2021. I closed my UK LTD business, I did one 12 month fixed-term contract and I witnessed the death-knell UK contracting, because of the widely detested Off-Payroll Worker Rules devastate the British contracting business. Of course, you all know about COVID-19 and now I prefer remote working (or least remote-first).

In 2021, I become a Technical Consultant / Senior Manager at Cognizant and a permanent employee.

Did you know that I was the Closing Keynote speaker for QCon London 2022? This event was held at the prestiguous Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in Westminister. It was the first conference in-person after the pandemic that I met attendees, who wore masks inside the presentation rooms. I was so proud and surprised to be selected by the committee.

Base Requirements

• fully-remote or remote-first (I’m based in Milton Keynes, England, UK)
• I enjoy working on a software products for public consumption
• I also enjoy building services for customers internally
• I very much like still technical coding although management seem to take a lot more of my time nowadays

My requirements for 2023 are:

• 100% remote (1-2 days in office per month I can live with remotee-first)
• £90K to £120K permanent base salary
• Contracting £600 per day Inside IR35 (Umbrella of my choice: Lucy’s Clarity is my PSL)
• Java 17 preferred, Java 11 LTS is very acceptable (if you company is stuck on Java 8 JDK 1.8, sorry I am not prepared to contribute to another digital transformation over-promise-and-then-spectacularly-fail project)
• Cloud-Native a nice definition and explanation from Microsoft
• Prospective Client must be using Kubernetes to deploy software to the cloud
• Prospective Client must be using Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Please read my Linkedin profile for accurate information www.linkedin.com/in/peterpilgrim2000

So in a nutshell:

I am looking for a permanent base salary from £90K to £110K in 2023. I will also consider contract roles for at least 6 months from £550 per day Inside IR35. I stopped contracting December 2020 and I closed my Limited Company.

PS: I will NOT work for directly or indirectly for gambling, betting and gaming clients.

Recent Technologies

Here are my last two engagements inside Cognizant:

Overview: Java Developer Consultant, Assistant Digital

Technologies: Java 17, Open JDK, Kubernetes, Rancher, Mockito, JUnit 5, MongoDB (Robo 3T), Eclipse Jetty, JAX-RS for RESTful Services, Kafka Broker, Quartz, Bazel (Buck)

Summary: Working for Department Work & Pensions (DWP) and Universal Credit project enhancements.

Overview: Developer Consultant, Technical Lead

Technologies: Java 11, Web CMS, JAX_RS, Gradle and Spring Boot

Summary: Working for Her Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO) and delivering EZRI Guidance tool and Overseas Casework Management Tool using the tech stack Java 8 / Java 11, Open JDK, Java CMS 7.3/7.4, Scala 2.13, Kubernetes v1.21, Helm 3.54, AWS Console

I care about company culture and people

• The company that I want to work for or be involved with is open, fair and transparent
• I want to work in an open culture, where frequent feedback is appreciated, psychological safe and honest.
• I want to see evidence of a values lived-in and also change. A company representative should be able to point to at least two critical improvements that occured within the last five years.
• I want to see diversity and less of the blame-culture that pervades less forthright businesses
• I want to see proactivity in ecological sustainability

In my opinion, disappointedly, I don’t see many serious Black managers and people who look like me who have been promoted inside organisations, perhaps, because I spent several years as a contractor. So I will have more respect for companies that have evidence of a new approach. I will look at your executive deision makers on the web.

I really do care about software technology and people who build the great products that we rely on everyday. In 2020, during the pandemic, I actually wrote, created and produced a non-technical online course on Vimeo called How to improve your personal performance in Java technology? (not free £££$$$). So excuse me and no offence intended if I refuse to join a “toxic culture” organisation.

I care about code and quality

• I have alway enjoyed writing great software since I was really young. In those days, writing arcades computer games stroked my ego a lot.
• I then grew up and really saw that software with great quality can improve people’s lives.
• I respect junior developers who fight with me trying to understanding Dependency Injection and Spring Boot and also those flighty engineers who know more Ruby than I do and do hipster programming in VIM.
• On the other hand, I’m not a Scala zealot nor want to be involved with the “one true way” of writing any code.
• I experienced pair-programming and saw benefits of culture teams. I write tests and I want them to pass green
• I want to cut out the endless useless meetings of plans about plans, but like General D. Eisenhower planning is the thing we should be all doing. We should be organizing and improving the software architecture of our projects; constantly cleaning up and refactoring.
• I want to take ownership of code with my team.
• I also reach out to other teams for help, because I too experienced the impractical issues around “silo-team” thinking.
• I need to work in an environment and code-base that considers these things as necessary and valuable.
• I also want to work where we can remove unnecessary artefacts.

I speak

I have been invited to speak at conferences and User Group Meet-ups.

I was so proud and honoured to be chosen to speak at QCon London 2022. I performed this non-technical talk called Software Engineering Towards Sustainable Empathic Capacities. It was the Closing Keynote of the conference too.

I have spoken at plenty of conferences. Here is a short list.

• JavaOne (San Francisco, USA)
• Oracle CodeOne (San Francisco, USA)
• QCon London
• JavaCro (Croatia)
• Devoxx Belgium
• Devoxx UK
• ACCU Conference
• Silicon Valley User Group
• Java Web User Group
• Scala Exchange

Back in the day, I founded a London technoology group called the Java Web User Group (JAVAWUG), which ran between 2004 and 2011.

Are you still interested?

More Information

Contact me:

E-mail 💌: peter.pilgrim@gmail.com

Website: https://www.xenonique.co.uk/

Blog: https://www.xenonique.co.uk/blog/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/peter_pilgrim

Linked-In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterpilgrim2000

+PP+ (C) 2023