Enchaine Informatic Limited is a 1-man company, founded in 1989 to enable me to work as a freelance software contractor. My name is David Hazel, and this website gives an overview of the kind of software I write, the industry sectors that I have worked in, and the technologies that I can develop software for.

My educational background is in science. I have a BSc in Physics from the University of Birmingham, and an MSc in Experimental Space Physics from the University of Leicester. This is a background which gives me strong problem-solving and analytical skills, as well as strong numeracy skills. I am also an excellent communicator, both verbally and in writing.

I have been working as a software developer since 1983. In the early days, I was involved in embedded and real-time systems, and later moved into business software applications. I also worked for a while at a space technology company, on space-related software and data management technologies.

This website gives an overview of my abilities as a software developer. For details about specific roles that I have worked in, please see my LinkedIn profile, or else contact me for a copy of my CV.

My areas of expertise can be broken down into:

• Finance
• Logistics and distribution
• CRM
• Data migration
• Other miscellaneous applications

More details of these can be found on the remaining pages of this site, together with the technologies that I have used and my contact page.

I am available to work on-site, alongside other developers, or off-site using my own equipment. I am very flexible in terms of working location, and will consider providing my services free of charge for a few days (say, up to a week) in order to demonstrate my abilities.

I have worked with finance applications on a number of occasions, covering such areas of business as:

• Bank Forex and Money Market dealing systems
• Accounting applications (Sales, Purchase and General ledgers)
• Insurance platforms
• Pensions software
• Expenses management software

I have extensive experience of working on logicstics and distribution software, covering such aspects as:

• Sales order capture
• Stock allocation to orders
• Inventory management
• Picking and shipping
• Goods receipt
• Warehouse management
• Stock counting
• Purchasing
• Related financial processing (Sales ledger, Purchase ledger and stock accounting)

Data migration, data feeds and data sharing are important aspects of application development.

Data migration is an essential part of implementing a new application to replace an existing one. Regardless of the technical differences between the old and new applications, there is almost always a necessity to move data from the old one into the new one. Designing the mechanism for doing this is as much part of the development of the new application as any other aspect of its functionality.

I have experience of analysing the requirements for data migration and implementing tools for achieving this.

Even when a new application is up and running live, there is often a need for it to take data from other applications, or to send data to other applications.

I have worked with a number of such data sharing (or data feeds, as they are often referred to), including:

• Creating XML documents to defined standards, such as for sending information to HMRC through the Government Gateway.
• CSV files for importing data into Excel.
• Defined-format files, for automatic import of data into other software.
• Posting data to web services, via HTTP, JSON or other standard formats.
• Querying data from Excel files into bespoke applications.

I have worked on a number of applications which don't fall into any of the other categories. These span embedded, real-time, desktop and web applications, and include:

• Personal finance software
• Miscellaneous internal applications at a food research company
• Costing software for a manufacturing company
• Software for recovering deleted data from disks and USB sticks
• Quality/defect tracking software
• Ticket tracking software for a light rail system
• Embedded software for satellite ground stations

Testing is a key aspect of software development, and I have experience with a number of approaches to testing, including:

• Test planning
• Test scripting for manual testing
• Unit testing
• Integration testing
• System testing
• Automated testing, using tools such as:
  • NUnit
  • MSTest
  • Specflow
  • Selenium
  • QUnit

I have worked with a wide variety of operating systems, programming languages and other technologies, over the years. The following is a list of the main ones, but is not exhaustive.

Programming languages:

My postal address is:

145 Maypole Lane
Birmingham
B14 4PF
United Kingdom

I can also be contacted by email at info@enchaine.com.

---