Our Experience

Hello! I'm Peter Washer, the developer behind Cyclick Development. I have over 13 years experience working in professional settings where I have amassed a wealth of knowledge of working with various embedded operating systems, coding environments and development tools. I created Cyclick Development to share that knowledge with other developers, and continue to learn with and from the developers I meet along the way.

I have a passion for programming, and take pride in being able mentor and teach my skills to others.

Learning is key to all of this, and this site also gives you an insight into some of the side projects, contributions and investigations I dig into to further myself and my knowledge.

Professional Summary

• MEng (Hons.) Electronic & Electrical Engineering
• Certified SCRUM Master (Scrum Alliance)

Motiviated, professional embedded systems engineer with 13 years experience working with various technologies from consumer electronics to industrial machinery control, and out to cloud technology development. I am experienced with Agile SCRUM and Prince 2 project management.

I thrive in environments where I can work with groups of highly motivated project engineers to deliver new technology and maintain existing products. I enjoy creating and applying processes and bringing technologies into working environments where this will increase the working efficiency and overall output quality of teams.

I take pride in writing high quality code and upholding others to the same standard. When documenting my work and project details, I go to particular lengths to ensure the documentation is concise, understandable and appropriate for the intended audience.

Key Skills

• Expert embedded C++ developer, with ability to clearly document and describe code design using UML.
• Administration and implementation of Azure DevOps, GitHub etc. for project and code management, CI/CD pipelines & peer review. Including migration projects from TFS to Azure DevOps using Microsoft's reccomended workflows.
• Strong ability to pick up new languages, systems and technologies quickly to facilitate prototyping, using the best tool for the task
• Rapid application prototyping using languages such as C#, NodeJS (Javascript) and Python
• Cloud service deployment and management using Docker running on Linux hosts
  Project management (Agile SCRUM, Prince2)
• Cloud provisioning and SAAS management

Roles & Experience

Instron (Principal Firmware Engineer / Engineering Project Manager)

July 2018 - Present
At Instron I am responsible for the embedded firmware of the Dynamic Systems product line. This includes the creation and implementation of processes which improve the quality of the firmware product, as well as designing and implementing new features. As the technical expert for the firmware, I have various mentoring responsibilities with more junior members of the team - something I really enjoy.

Over the course of my employment at Instron I have taken the firmware codebase from a mix of poorly controlled, mixed quality code to a high quality environment with rigid processes for peer review, code style and test - proved very helpful by the significant reduction in support calls relating to firmware. This has involved taking risks like completely redesigning features, but the quality improvements continue to pay off.

The critical project at Instron is the design of our next generation controller. For this project I am functioning as Technical Lead, and overseeing the decisions on technology types and their integration. I have been pushing for the use of off-the-shelf technology to accelerate development and enable us to focus our design effort on core competencies. Historically Instron has designed everything from scratch, but I am driving this change through the department which is also allowing us to better align with customer needs and industry trends.

We are focussing on the use of EtherCAT as our real-time data bus. To be able to implement our own EtherCAT devices has required a lot of knowledge capture, research and interaction with suppliers like Acontis and Texas Instruments to ensure we are selecting the most appropriate electronic components, processors, software and networking hardware to enable the new controller.

Frontier Silicon (Senior Software Engineer)

April 2015 - July 2018
At Frontier Silicon my work was split between developing new embedded firmware for smart radios, such as implementing a WebSocket server for real-time communication; and developing cloud services for pulling back telemetry and usage statistics from the smart devices. I learned a lot about writing efficient code for low-memory low-performance hardware. A particular highlight was creating an API allowing a basic smart radio to interface with Amazon Alexa and Google Home for content playback - something which was very new at the time! Security was a focus for web services, microservices, the Docker and Kubernetes toolsets. I maintain these skills as part of my hobby interests by managing websites and services for friends with small businesses.

Instron (Embedded Systems Engineer)

June 2011 - April 2015
I started at Instron as a graduate where I built my C++ and C# expertise working on the introduction of the ElectroPuls linear-electric motor based test frame. I learned the principles of designing for test, encapsulation, and gained a good understanding of the use of UML for communicating designs with other team members.
I am proud of my implementation of a three-stage-valve controller for which I ran a small team, replacing an older analogue hardware device. I created a system that gives much faster installation and setup times, and enables easier performance tuning. This implementation ships on most Instron structural testing rigs.

BBC Research & Development (Industrial placement)

July 2009 - June 2010
I worked at BBC Research & Development in London on industrial placement following my third year at University. Working in a large team developing the YouView set top box and a prototype interface to the BBC iPlayer service, this was my first experience of Agile Project Management. The team focused nature of working in sprints, and with a continuously groomed backlog, created a highly efficient workforce - something I’ve strived to achieve in roles ever since. I enjoyed the feeling of excitement within the team that we were working on a product which at the time had the potential to be disruptive in the marketplace.

Education

Master of Engineering (Hons) Electronic & Electrical Engineering - Loughborough University (2:1)

A-levels: Maths, Physics, Electronics; AS-level: Geography, General studies
GCSEs including Maths, English, German, French, Dual-award science and D&T

Outside of work

I enjoy implementing my own smart-home technology from small sensors and power monitors to complex network installations, as well as designing and printing my own parts on a 3D printer. I enjoy being able to implement the equivalent of commercial technologies for myself and understand the underlying protocols and challenges. I love to learn and apply new things.

I am a keen cyclist and runner and am proud to have completed various challenges including a half marathon and a 100 mile ride. With an eye for photography I enjoy helping my wife with her award winning wedding videography business, Veiled Productions.