Consultants
Christopher Lack

Christopher Lack has a passion for technology and a track record of delivering customer solutions that exceed the norm in terms of user satisfaction and maintainability. He has extensive development experience in: a variety of industries; full life-cycle using both agile and traditional methodologies; front to back end with strong UI and SQL skills. Roles have included programming, design, analysis, team leading and project management. See here for full CV or download it.
Christopher has operated as a contractor since 2006. He is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and Business Component Developerand also a member of the The Association of Independent Professionals and the Self Employed.
Hellas Direct
, AthensSept 2013 - March 2016 (inc 4 extensions)
Development of market leading car insurance website, www.hellasdirect.gr/en, along with back-office software for customer services team. Instrumental in development of new mobile site.
Hitachi Capital Vehicle Solutions
, NewburyOct 2011 - Sept 2013 (inc 4 extensions)
Development of commercial vehicle fleet management software with services provided including analysis and elements of project management.
Yell
, ReadingJan 2011 - Oct 2011 (inc 4 extensions)
Provided software development consultancy to support the marketing BI and sales teams. Built software on top of Nutch to crawl customer websites and analyser their level of sophistication in terms of SEO, user experience and HTML ability. Enhanced a reporting application used both internally and by Yell customers. Decided the technology stack for a sales information portal, coded the skeleton application and acted as Java technical lead. Developed a prototype multi-vendor e-commerce website.
LexusNexis Axxia
, TwyfordSept 2010 - Dec 2010 (inc 1 extension)
Developed new functionality for a Legal software package, including enhancements to workflow and billing software.
Alfresco
, MaidenheadJune 2009 - Sept 2010 (inc 1 extension)
Helped to produce a showcase website that demonstrates best practice in publishing from Alfresco to an internet website.
Centennial Software
, Swindon and NewburyDec 2009 - June 2010 (inc 1 extension)
Returned to this customer to help with a strategic project. Modified thread processing to handle large data volumes. Used JAXB and StAX to move slices of data between databases using XML. Introduced custom annotations to aid maintenance of cross-cutting concerns. Documented design using UML. Solved load test errors found with JMeter by extending Struts with declarative transaction support. Set up new web service application using Maven and Spring 3. Prototyped introduction of Hibernate 3.5. Promoted Wiki use.
Associated Northcliffe Digital
, LondonSept 2008 - Nov 2009 (inc 3 extensions)
Development and maintenance of the www.metro.co.uk website in an agile/scrum environment. Improved the separation of concerns within the application. Made SEO changes to the website. Modified data feeds for robustness. Restructured and added to the wiki documentation. Improved the development environment and procedures. Also, as part of a complete redesign of the site, worked on the back-end using JCR to access CRX (Jackrabbit).
Centennial Software
, SwindonMay 2007 - July 2008 (inc 4 extensions)
Developed data access layer and business delegates for a complex web application. Made significant additions to the web UI using JSP and Struts, including the most complex data entry and reporting pages within the application. Introduced a use of design patterns in the data access layer to reduce development time and improve robustness. Gained extensive business knowledge to ensure the requirements were fully implemented.
Waitrose
, BracknellOct 2006 - May 2007 (inc 1 extension)
Changed the Java code of a reporting application to access new DB2 views and tables. At the same time added/changed the functionality of the JSP/HTML reports, changed the help text to XML, and made improvements to the maintainability of the application.