Sarah Kelly

Not like the other programmers

Employment History

I currently work in the university’s Student First team, maintaining and developing their enrolment software that we are building in-house, slowly replacing the current system run by Jade. This integration has developed into a unique and complex tech-stack that I am working towards understanding as a full-stack developer. My role (so far) includes:

• Building the API in Python/Django;
• Maintaining the system’s infrastructure on AWS, using Python/Pulumi;
• Developing the data transfer service to Azure's eventhub;
• Some business process work in the low-code platform OutSystems;
• Some development in our integration message bus, written in C#;
• Wrestling with the integration of proprietary legacy systems;
• Agile development with the help of Jira, Confluence and Slack;
• Helping manage the workload across the backend team;
• Designing and developing new features and data structures;
• Maintaining and improving existing legacy code;
• Unit and integration testing;
• Debugging with Sentry and Cloudwatch across all environments;

As well as my day-to-day work, I am also responsible for:

• Maintaining the health of the environments on AWS used for testing and pre-production;
• Maintaining the health of the API Gitlab repo and pipeline;
• Deploying releases and patches to production and improving our process;
• Tech leading and assisting with the design of new, large-scale features, including the new data transfer service and the new equity project collecting sensitive student data;
• A large portion of the documentation relating to developer onboarding, the API, deployments to production and working in AWS;

Remote travel writing to client specification in order to fund my travels around Europe.

GCA Lawyers is a small, boutique firm (10-20 solicitors) that specialises in plaintiff litigation and class/group actions. Due to the size of the firm, I was given significant autonomy and the role required self-direction. My roles in the firm included:

Junior solicitor on the Southern Response Class Action

• Assisting Partner and Senior Solicitor on a large-scale action with 30+ clients;
• Maintaining individual client portfolios of class action members;
• Assisting in communication with barristers and litigation funders;
• Briefing experts and reviewing reports and other evidence;
• Legal research and maintaining up-to-date knowledge of current relevant law;
• Assisting with the wider litigation strategy in the action;
• Assisting with the action billing protocol.

Litigation solicitor (specialising in Insurance Law)

• Maintaining a client portfolio of approximately 25 clients at a time;
• Conducting initial client meetings;
• Briefing experts – usually engineers, builders and quantity surveyors;
• Liasing with the High Court and District Councils;
• Dispute resolution;
• Client communication, including letters of advice, client meetings and strategy discussions;
• Attending mediations and settlement negotiations;
• Drafting court documents;
• Legal research into complex and rapidly changing areas of law.
• Maintaining clients outside of my usual area of expertise, including immigration, bankruptcy, relationship property, family, property and resource management law.
• Maintaining the firm’s social media and assisting with firm marketing.

Office Manager and member of the Human Resources Team in the head-office of a global IT company specialising in Saas products.

Education and Training

Institute of Professional Legal Studies

• Admitted to the bar as a Barrister and Solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand in 2013.

University of Canterbury

• Graduated 2013 with Bachelor of Laws.
• Graduated 2011 with Bachelor of Science majoring in Biological Sciences.

Referees

Either written references or referee contact details available on request.

Contact

Skill set

• C# :
• Javascript/jQuery :
• HTML/CSS :
• AWS/Pulumi :
• Ruby on Rails :
• Python/Django :
• Dispute Resolution :
  
• Project Management :
  
• Research :
  
• Written Communication :
  

Projects