Mark Andrews Email Address

Lead Developer

Founded in 1824, we are the oldest animal welfare organisation in the world. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) is a charity registered in England and Wales no. 219099. As a charity we will, by all lawful means, prevent cruelty, promote kindness to and alleviate suffering of all animals.

I'm a passionate and driven application developer at heart, and will always have an interest in this area, but am fully embracing my Architectural Role. I'm constantly involved in some really interesting projects for the RSPCA, focusing on high level design and producing papers for architectural recommendations for senior staff in the business units and for project work being carried out by the IT department. I am also working with a lot of third party suppliers, consultants, project managers and technical staff. Our technology stack here is predominantly Java based, but taking on this role has been useful to try and think in terms of the problem and be agnostic to a specific technology solution. The RSPCA has given me the opportunity to take on responsibilities and activities that will be essential for my Architectural role, these include: Building and maintaining a reference architecture of the societies 'AS-IS' position, this includes: Data Layer, Application Layer, Technology Layer and Business Function/Capability. Defining 'TO-BE' architecture, and mapping this back to the 'AS-IS' to understand the transformation between the two. Previously I worked as a lead developer for the RSPCA. I am an advocate of java best practices, test driven development (TDD), design patterns and “clean code” and try to advocate this with my peers. I worked as part of an agile development team and helped create the processes in which the team functions. I also played a key role in setting up the technology (Subversion, Hudson CI Server, deployment processes) that supports those processes. Other duties performed whilst in the development team were, technical analysis and design, wire framing, mentoring and support for difficult technical challenges faced by other developers.