Software Engineer Manager

Simon Brereton Ferns

Flat ****, ** Woodfield Road, Altrincham, WA144RR - +44(0)747-***-****

**************@*****.*** - www.linkedin.com/in/sbreretonferns Summary

Young IT professional with 7+ years experience working as an application developer on the IBM Mainframe

(z/OS) platform. I currently specialize in developing & supporting the bank’s debit card app (CAMS II from DXC) running on the Hogan Umbrella architecture.

In my spare time I play and collect guitars and enjoy going to concerts/music festivals. I also love tinkering with Raspberry Pi computers, in particular around Home Automation. I really like travelling and exploring new places on the weekends too.

Software engineer 2012 to Present

Barclays UK

I started my career in IT at Barclays as an apprentice in 2012. After 18 months I became a permanent employee and have worked my way up from there.

My primary role is the technical lead of a small group of developers working on the Hogan Umbrella software for the bank’s debit cards application. I’m also involved in large-scale projects for system resiliency, supporting the production service and implementing new technologies on the mainframe. Dev projects:

- Lead a technical project to upgrade to Hogan Umbrella v5, which involved rewriting and modifying custom & delivered assembler programs to make use of 64-bit technology to fit the new Umbrella architecture. This upgrade from Hogan Umbrella v403 was implemented within 8 months, from software delivery to production with no incidents.

- Implemented a zero-downtime approach to production releases to allow us to deliver large software drops in weekly release cycles, without impacting the production service for our customers.

- Built a custom DevOps pipeline for z/OS Connect API development; utilising BitBucket, Jenkins, and CA-Endevor REST APIs to automate the dev/deployment process. I worked with IBM master developers to design and implement this CI/CD pipeline.

- Designed & implemented a solution to obtain and manage JWT (JSON Web Tokens) in a CICS application, utilising 64-bit shared memory to cache tokens across multiple CICS servers, allowing for high-availability and automatic recovery.

Large group-wide projects:

- Produced an application-specific plan to safely shut-down and restart the mainframe systems in a new data-centre. Working this year to move the applications across two data-centres without incurring an outage for our customers. I’m the technical point of contact for the debit cards application in a large (1500+ staff) project.

- Designed and implemented application & scheduling changes to support a 4-way data sharing sysplex mainframe environment to provide better availability and recovery of our debit cards application.

- Integrated Service-NOW change management platform with Hogan’s Change Control system to meet the bank’s ITIL change procedures.

- Worked with IBM & Barclays Infrastructure colleagues to install zOS connect on the mainframe, along with a custom interface to the Umbrella architecture to REST API enable our Hogan applications (CAMS II). Simon Brereton Ferns

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Programming languages

● High-level Assembler

● COBOL

● Rexx

● Java

● SQL

Dev tools & technologies

● zOS (traditional MVS & Unix system services)

zOS Connect, CICS, Db2, MQ, IMS, VSAM

● Jenkins

● Git

● CA-Endevor

● CICSPlex System Manager

Education & training

Holmes Chapel Sixth form College

Graduated A levels in Economics, IT and Psychology Jul 2012 RSM COBOL training - beginner & advanced Sep 2012

Mainframe Assembler training - beginner Nov 2014

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