Your website for free!
Day(s)
:
Hour(s)
:
Minute(s)
:
Second(s)
Import of products, animals, food and feed system (IPAFFS) - DEFRA
April 2022 – August 2023
Following Brexit, Great Britain had to develop its own system for the import of animals, plants and more. Today, importers and import agents must use IPAFFS to notify authorities in Great Britain before those goods arrive from EU and non-EU countries.
Tech stack:
Government Design System (GDS) HTML SASS Handlebars Javascript Azure Node.js JAVA SQL Python Cheerio Selenium Sinon Chai Mocha Mockito JUnit Groovy SHELL Docker Cucumber
This is a critical system for the wellbeing of the country. An important bug on IPAFFS could mean delay in imports, less products in our retail stores and rise in grocery product prices…
Involvement
- Led the development of the national system used for notifying the import of live animals, animal products and high-risk food and feed into the UK, allowing trading to continue following Brexit and leading to an expected £36 million in savings for DEFRA over 6 years.
- Implemented new functionalities in both the frontend and backend using technologies such as the Government Design System (GDS), HTML, SASS, Handlebars, Javascript, Azure, Node.js, Java 8/11, SQL and Python for retrieving and manipulating large amounts of data.
- Consistently wrote unit and e2e tests using Cheerio, Selenium, Sinon, Chai and Mocha in the frontend, Mockito and JUnit in the backend.
- Fixed bugs found in production (investigated through Azure application insights) avoiding import delays and increase in products prices.
- Improved the security of databases connections enabling Azure Managed Identity, populated using Groovy, SHELL scripts and Docker.
- Conducted a migration of the Cucumber testing framework from version 1.2.5 to 7.8.0 in all microservices concerned which resulted in a reduction of up to 8 minutes of all CI/CD Jenkins pipelines thus accelerating the release of new functionalities and bug fixes to production.
- Mentoring of junior developers, pair programming and conducting code reviews.
Feedbacks
-
Team Lead: “I have had the pleasure of working with Marc on IPAFFS (Defra Account).
What I’m impressed with….
I never have to worry about Marc meeting agreed timelines. If anything, Marc has a tendency to deliver tickets ahead of the estimate given, without ever complaining. He always works through unexpected issues, collaborates when required and is a breath of fresh air. He’s an asset to this project.Marc has onboarded, educated, mentored a number of our team members who have grown from strength to strength. We had a new starter join the project who was unable to get access to the technical tools for 3 weeks. Marc paired with him, talking him through everything he was doing to try and educate and onboard him during the difficult situation we were in. Marc is also pairing with another new starter who has come in at the same level as Marc. The new starter has expressed how helpful it is pairing with Marc as he is learning a lot ranging across; machine setup, technical ways of working, code base, product knowledge, etc.
We had a situation before Christmas where commodity code changes that our testers made caused issues in production. Although this was an issue that wasn’t linked to work Marc had done, he swiftly jumped onto this issue and started to debug and troubleshoot. He kept us updated with his progress and findings throughout the day which allowed us to manage the stakeholders expectations. It’s thanks to Marc that this issues was swiftly rectified.
During our ceremonies; Marc leads conversations to support newer team members who have less knowledge about the work. This helps to give them context and understanding about what the requirements are asking for. Marc has been participating in our sprint ceremonies. He’s spoken up in planning and refinement sessions, carried out demonstrations of his work in review sessions and even led on a retrospective; talking each of us through the items on the board.
Overall, Marc has excellent communication skills, he is brilliant at remaining calm in stressful situations, identifying solutions to challenges faced and supporting the team to meet the agreed delivery scope and timelines.”
- Business Analyst: “His efforts helped unblock work and allowed the team to progress forward. Marc is an important member of the team and deserves to be recognized for his dedication and exceptional performance. Marc went above and beyond this sprint, completing both his own assigned work, helping other team members with their sprint work, as well as working outside of his hours in the R&D space.”
- Senior Software Engineer: “It has been an absolute pleasure to work with Marc. Coming onto the DEFRA project at first was very daunting due to the complexity and unfamiliar technology, Marc gave freely of his time to help me get up to speed. I am extremely grateful for his help and support throughout my time on the project.”
- Technical Architect: “Hi Marc, I wanted to take a moment to provide some feedback on your performance. Marc and I joined the team Tayto on the same day April 2022 working on the project IPAFFs. I have noticed that Marc is a quick learner and always happy to help when asked. These are great qualities to have in a team, and I appreciate your positive attitude. I am also impressed your great contributions in the DatePicker theme”
- Junior Software Engineer: “Marc has assisted me on projects and has always been a friendly face on the team, making me feel very welcome when i joined in June. He is a very good teacher when it come to areas I have less experience in and makes time to help members of the team when they need it :)”
