Ben Mechen
About
Hey 👋! I'm a full stack web and app developer from Bournemouth.
I've worked on a number of projects of varying complexity over 3 years of professional development. These projects have been in a number of technologies, including HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, Node, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, Firebase, and more.
My speciality is web & mobile apps requiring complex backend systems. My focus is on building secure, fast, and reliable applications, utilising technology such as Kubernetes to deliver scalable infrastructure.
I strive to deliver high quality, maintainable code, focusing on unit testing, documentation, and architecture.
Technologies
Experience
Chelsea Apps
Lead developer at Chelsea Apps
- Code Reviews and Git best practices -
- Full testing scaffold, allowing us to catch issues before production -
- Moving from a rudimentary, unscalable infrastructure to resilient and scalable container based deployements -
- Introduction of CI/CD pipelines for all projects to automate linting, testing and deployment -
Freelance
Websites & App
University of Nottingham
BSc Computer Science
Here, I learned the fundamentals of computer science, software engineering, working as a team, and many other skills.
Projects
Bother
Bother is a web app that looks to change the way we shop by automating the usually dull process of shopping for non-perishable goods through intelligent machine learning.
I helped develop many parts of Bother, and took on maintaining the project going forwards.
Least
Least is a web app aiming to provide faster commercial leasing using a digital, collaborative approach.
I architected the platform and lead the development team to deliver a high quality product. The hardest part of this project was the complex data flows, requiring many moving parts to provide a user friendly app and simplify the leasing process.
Football Exchange
Football Exchange is a mobile application centred around buying and selling shares in football players, individually and through indexes.
As with Least, I architected the platform and lead the development team to deliver a high quality product. The trickiest part of this project was the trading engine and algorithms, as well as complying with UK gambling regulations.
As the app accepted real money payments, security was one of the key focuses for us during development. We also had to make sure the system was scalable to handle load spikes around games, news events, etc.
Ride
Ride was a native iOS application designed around lift sharing; using a location based system based around groups of friends to match people looking for lifts with people looking to earn some side money offering lifts.
The app included user to user direct payments, mapping, KYC handling, direct messaging, an advanced price calculation algorithm using the car's MPG and journey length, and bill sharing between multiple passengers.
CodeSet
CodeSet was my personal A Level Computing coursework. It is a web application designed to teach KS3 students Python in the classroom through a series of interactive tutorials, with a gamified process allowing students to compete with each other by climing the class leaderboard. Teachers are able to manage multiple classes, add students, and set homework deadlines.
Moving On Counselling
Moving On Counselling required a new website for their counselling business. I worked with them to pick a Wordpress theme to suit their needs, then customise it to make it their own.
SEO was a key requirement for this project, and I took great care to create a fast, indexable site aimed at achiving a high ranking in search engines.
Contact
Have an idea for a new app or website? Get in touch below 😃