Brief Technical Overview

This is a brief, one-page, overview of my (Simon Le Pine) experience working in technology and software development. The majority of my career has been insurance+technology so I feel my resume & job titles do not accurately outline my experience software/data engineering experience. My hope is this provides a valuable resource in addition to my resume, which can be found here.

  • 1999 to 2011 – Side projects and startup ideas
      • Started on old LAMP servers.
      • I had an old Geocities account back when that platform existed and people used the <blink> tag.
      • Worked with PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Flash/Actionscript, etc.
      • Tech startups were never really successful but I had a strong focus on security and sound development practices. I’ve also never had a server or email hacked.
  • 2012 to 2014 – Guardian Risk Managers
      • Hired to build & release online home insurance.
      • At this time Lloyd’s of London was very new to online insurance and very nervous about the risk exposure.
      • Planned the application architecture, information security, automated underwriting decisions, etc (to satisfy Lloyd’s of London).
  • 2014 to 2016 – Optimum Insurance
      • Built an internal web app that managed all new & renewal insurance policies.
      • PostgreSQL with stored procedures mirroring an Oracle data warehouse.
      • Local web app server was NGINX + PHP + JS/HTML
      • Replaced many duplicate data entry workflows and 100’s of Excel spreadsheets.
  • 2016 to 2018 – Cansure Insurance
      • Built a noSQL data lake as a single source of truth for company data.
      • The database server was Debian+MariaDB, the application server was Debian+Apache+PHP.
      • Pulled in data from underwriting, claims, accounting, and HR. Primarily these were in Excel or CSV format.
      • Built scheduled jobs and stored procedures to created structured tables (materialized views) from the unstructured noSQL data lake.
      • Built a public-facing web app allowing insurance brokers to buy construction insurance policies.
      • Built a public-facing web app for association members to renew insurance policies and pay via merchant processing account.
  • 2018 to 2020 – On disability recovering from a near-fatal car crash.
      • Took courses on Python3 and Django while recovering.
      • Built a data access tool for OSME (Office of Small & Medium Enterprise, Federal Government of Canada).
  • 2020 to present – ITS Consulting
    • Built a dashboard for ITS clients to view the status of various IT systems (email server downtime, power outages, firewall, phishing emails, dark web monitoring, etc).
    • Built a web app for previewing 3D printing files in augmented reality. The file conversion code was written in Python3 and Bash.
    • Built a web app for a religious organization to store gigabytes of audio/video content on AWS S3 and integrate with their WordPress site.
    • Managed a global HR intranet where they share jobs, talk about industry trends, etc.
    • After a full code review the existing developer of the HR intranet was fired and I was asked to fully rebuild the application as the code was of such poor quality.