Robin Whittleton

Employment

1. Government Digital Service

   Head of Front-end Development, and Senior Developer

   November 2015 – present

   • Head of the community of front-end developers within GDS: responsibilities include learning and development organisation, allocation of people to product teams and pastoral care of the community
   • Building a cross-government community of front-end developers and providing channels to collaborate on shared code
   • Being a single internal and external point of contact for GDS’s front-end development
   • Managing recruitment and retention of front-end developers
   • Line manager to five colleagues; responsibilities include career and performance management, pastoral care
   • Development work on GDS’s shared front-end tooling and on GOV.UK Verify

   Developer

   April 2015 – November 2015

   • Front-end developer on GOV.UK Verify, the authentication and sign-in platform for new UK government services
   • Collaboration with user research to increase the percentage of people able to access and complete identity verification
   • Identifying and implementing points of improvement that span multiple services to meet user needs and reduce overall technical debt
   • Planning a rebuild of a microservice in order to increase long-term productivity and meet assessment goals
   • Blogging and working on GDS’s open source projects, with the aim of making the web better for all while increasing GDS’s profile

2. Kyan

   Senior Web Developer

   March 2008 – March 2015

   • Development of a wide range of web sites and applications for startups and established businesses
   • Project scoping and management with clients, to bring their systems in on time and in budget
   • Close collaboration with designers to realise their layouts in a way that is accurate to their intentions across a range of devices
   • Responsibility for building the entire user interface of the site, including user interaction, performance and accessibility
   • Laying the foundations of an efficient back-end implementation by building skeleton applications ready for business logic
   • Mentoring of interns and providing in-office training in my specialisms

3. Abacus eMedia

   Senior Web Developer

   August 2005 – March 2008

   • Development of the front-end of large county council and publishing sites
   • Direct management and training of a team of front-end developers
   • Training clients in both development techniques and the use of our CMS software
   • Extensive experience with developing to strict accessibility requirements

4. Hemscott Group – Web Developer

   September 2004 – August 2005

   • Styling and integration of investor relations tools
   • Working with large companies (including FTSE 100s) to exact specifications

5. Freelance

   Web Developer

   August 2003 – August 2004

Skills

Core

• Fluent in the core web technologies used to build responsive and semantic web sites and applications
• Use of Javascript from progressive enhancement through to custom canvas animation and front-end applications
• In-depth knowledge of cross-browser compatibility issues and the combinations of technologies that cause them
• Use of back-end technologies (especially Ruby on Rails) to create views and to manage asset build chains (e.g. SASS)
• Preference for OS X (or other UNIX) environments

Tuition

• Mentoring of junior front-end developers to give them a more fundamental understanding of the techniques they are learning
• Presenting technologies in an interesting and understandable way, both as a conference speaker and in internal briefings

Other

• Proof-reading and copy editing, with an emphasis on readable typography
• Full driving licence

Education

1. University of Exeter – BSc Computer Science 2:2 Honours

   September 2000 – June 2003

2. Farnham College, Farnham, Surrey – A-levels

   September 1996 – June 1998

   A-levels in Maths, Physics. AS-levels in Music, Further Maths