Daniel // Mason

Daniel Mason
Full Curriculum Vitea

Skills

Customer / User Support

Daniel has a long history of working in Customer Service areas, providing technical and non technical support. This covers a wide range of areas, and contact types; from dealing with customers face to face, by phone and mail, to working through complicated technical issues with colleagues both local and international.

In particular, Daniel aims to achieve the following:

  • A disciplined approach to problem solving from initial recording in HP Quality Centre through to obtaining and installing a problem fix
  • Approachability, people turn to him when they need help
  • Takes the Initiative, he always looks for ways to improve current systems
  • Training, Daniel helps people to understand problems they are having and how they are resolved

Additionally Daniel is:

  • Committed to the Task
  • Flexible And Agile
  • A Problem Solver

The section on Achievements below expands the details given here

Testing

Daniel has over a year's worth of experience as a User Acceptance Tester, and one years experience as a Functional Tester.

Testing Experience:

  • HP Quality Centre
  • Report Writing
  • ST, SIT, NFT, FT and UAT Environments

Software Development

Daniel is skilled in a wide range of languages, both compiled and interpreted, environments and APIs.

Compiler Languages:

  • C++ and Windows Resource Script
  • Objective C and Cocoa Touch
  • C and NQC

Interpreted Languages:

  • Visual Basic and VBA
  • Java Script
  • Java
  • ActionScript and Lingo

Environments:

  • Visual Studio
  • G++
  • Xcode
  • Flash and Director

APIs:

  • DirectX 9 and 11
  • Windows
  • Cocoa Touch

Web Development

Along with traditional desktop applications, Daniel is also an experienced web developer.

Server Side Development:

  • Scripting languages PHP and Perl
  • MySQL Database Development
  • Apache Server Administration

Client Side Deployment:

  • HTML 5 and CSS 3
  • JavaScript (including AJAX)
  • Platform specific deployment

Achievements

Tesco User/Customer Support

Daniel wrote all of the Quality Centre Report Scripts used by his managers to assess progress and identify key system defects. (User Support, SQL, VBA, HP Quality Centre)

Daniel rewrote most of the expressions used to validate the Online Contact Forms. This was done using previous knowledge of Regular Expression, and of the various areas of Tesco Customer Service. (Problem Resolution, JavaScript, RegEx)

Early in its deployment Tesco's internal Knowledgebase system started producing errors and suffering performance issues. These were caused by uploading information directly from Microsoft Word (which resulted in bloated HTML). Daniel created a tool that removed the excess HTML, reducing file size to approximately 10%, and fixing the errors it had caused. An updated version of this tool is available on his website. (Problem Resolution, VBA)

Daniel met with Brian Pritchard, CEO of LiveXChange (a Tesco Contractor) to discuss defects found in the Home Working Application process. (People Skills, Vendor Relations, User Support)

Tesco Customer Services

In the letters department of Tesco Customer Services, each member of staff has their signature stored as an image on the system for placing into each of their letters. Occasionally a problem occurred during printing where the signature moved from its position when viewed in the file, to elsewhere on the page. Daniel used his own time to find the cause of this and write a macro that would prevent this from happening. (Initiative)

Daniel was nominated for a Service Award for dealing with a particularly unpleasant issue relating to a child injured in a store. (Customer Service)

Tesco User Acceptance Tester

Daniel was left in charge of the UAT team in the absence of the Line Manager. Tasks included distributing work and being the point of contact for the rest of the Change Program. (Leadership)

Tesco Projects

Daniel created two Wage Sheets (a four week sheet for Tesco staff and a one week sheet for contract staff). The sheets kept track of standard pay, overtime, holidays and deductions (such as pensions, BAYE shares, union fees etc) and calculated tax. (Excel)

Daniel worked on their Insurable Risk team, whose job was to call customers after accidents in store. They always tried to call customers six times before writing to them, and they kept track of the calls on paper. Daniel wrote a Tool that allowed users to record call backs in a spreadsheet. The tool also prevented data loss inherent to shared workbooks. (Excel, VBA)

Software Engineering   Personal Projects

Daniel wrote a Mersenne Twister in C++ which then became the basis for much of his work in pseudo random procedural generation. (C++)

Daniel created his personal website using PHP, AJAX and WordPress. (PHP, HTML, CSS)

To give a button an icon when creating a tool in Microsoft Office, it is necessary to know the Icons FaceID. As information on what each FaceID looks like is hard to come by, Daniel wrote a simple tool that allows the user to browse them. The tool is available on his website.

Experience

Tesco Customer Service
User Support 2010 - present
User Acceptance Tester 2010 - present
Customer Services Manager 2009 - 2010

Search (contracted to Tesco Customer Services)
Customer Service Manager 2008 - 2009

University of Abertay Dundee
MSc Computer Games Technology (Software Engineering) 2006 - 2008

VMC Consulting
Functional Games Tester 2005 - 2006

The University of Bradford
BSc Cybernetics and Virtual Worlds, 2ii with Honors 2001 - 2005

Portman Business Sciences
Junior Technician 2001

Quick Bio

Name:Daniel Mason
Age:28
Location:Dundee
Hometown:Reading
  
Occupation:User Acceptance Tester
  
Education:BSc Cybernetics and Virtual Worlds
MSc Computer Games Technology

Contact Info

E-mail:daniel at danielmason dot com
LinkedIn:Daniel James Mason
Twitter:@Gisleburt