Ash Williams

I am the unit leader for first year Web Development, second year Full Stack Development and third year Mobile Computing. I am also the departments employability and placements lead and the programme leader for our BSc Software Engineering course.

Units taught:

• Web Development: A gental introduction to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Students create a website for their favourite band/musician and interact with a RESTful API to provide the ability to sign up to a mailing list.
• Full Stack Web Development: Students are provided with an OpenAPI specification and a series of automated tests (written with Mocha and Chai). In the first half of the assessment they implement the API using Node, Express, and SQLite. Then for the second half of the assessment they create the front end using VueJS (see more: https://github.com/ash-williams/fsd_blog_engine_server)
• Mobile Computing: Students are provided with a backend server which implements an OpenAPI specification. They then create a React Native application which interacts with the API. Each year, the assignment API mimics an existing social media application (e.g., WhatsApp (https://github.com/ash-williams/whatsthat)). Students are also introduced to scalable architectures and security considerations.

Responsibilities:

• Programme Leader: I am responsible for the overall undergraduate Software Engineering course. This includes the overall coherance and delivery of the course, as well as catering to the needs of all students enrolled.
• Employability and Placements Lead: I interface with companies to help them build relationships with students and develop talent pipelines. I created and chair the departments Industry Advisory Board which is made up of senior leaders from organisations which regularly recruit our students. The board meets twice a year to discuss the curriculum and opportunities for engagement.

Other:

• Set up a group where students work on projects for social good. Typically applications and websites for charities and non-profit organisations.
• Personal tutoring, mentorship, and project supervision for undergraduate and postgraduate students.
• Consulted on, and co-developed projects to design extra-curricular courses aimed at plugging the digital skills gap.

I aided in the development and delivery of software engineering and data science units across multiple undergraduate and postgraduate units. In addition, I volunteered during University open days to promote the department to new students.

Units taught:

• Tutoring on the Masters level introduction to data science (Python)
• Tutoring on the 3rd year web computing architectures course (JavaScript, Node, Express, MySQL, VueJS)
• Tutoring on the 2nd year team project module (Java)
• Tutoring on the 1st year programming module (Python)
• Tutoring on the 1st year foundations of engineering module

Other:

• Mark exam papers for the Accounting and Information Systems department
• University open days and events

Responsibilities:

• Product based technical services and release management (including customer patching and maintianing test systems).
• Network design and maintainence
• Development of data analytics module and reporting for the main product (PL/SQL, Oracle, AngularJS)