Andrew Paterson

Curriculum Vitae - Andrew Paterson

Senior Software Engineer

Skills

Key competencies

API design and implementation
Database design implementation
Frontend design and development
Team management
Project coordination across departments
AWS console (Route53, s3, CloudFront)

Technologies

JavaScript

Nodejs

TypeScript

Ember.js

Elixir

Phoenix

SQL

Github actions

Education

Bachelor of Laws (LLB)

Rhodes University

2006 - 2007

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Rhodes University

2003 - 2005

Work experience

Staff engineer

Hyrax Biosciences, June 2025 - March 2026

Worked with colleagues across teams
- Devops and deployment strategy and implementation
- Database and API design for a fully combined platform
- Corresponding design and implementation of a unified platform UI
- Platform wide automated testing strategy
- Design of the internal API and UI to meet the needs of team members responsible for billing and business analytics
Development work on the combined platform
- API rebuild
  - SQL migrations to implement database design
  - Development up new account management features in the API from the ground up.
  - Revamp of internal API to accommodate platform changes.
  - Robust test suite
- Combined platform user interface for the Exatype product built in Ember.js

Frontend and API lead

Hyrax Biosciences, April 2023 - May 2025

Oversaw the merge of the Exatype NGS HIV and Exatype SARS-CoV-2 products into a single platform with a product store.
- Lead the redesign UI.
- Worked with current API developer to redesign the API and database structure in order to accommodate the merge.
  - Created a mock server which illustrated the various API routes and their responses.
- Implemented all design and code changes required at the UI level.

Frontend team lead

Hyrax Biosciences, March 2021 - March 2023

Oversaw the hiring of a new frontend team member.
- Liaised with recruitment agency
- Created technical assignment and assessed submissions
- Conducted first interviews and attended follow-up interviews.
Conducted the onboarding, training and management of the new team member
- Assigned onboarding projects
- Conducted code reviews
- Created process related documentation
Continued development and maintenance of Admin API and existing Ember.js user interfaces.

Full stack developer

Hyrax Biosciences, November 2017 - February 2021

Continued the development of the user interfaces for the Exatype NGS HIV and Exatype Sanger HIV products.
Developed an API for internal company use using the Phoenix framework in Elixir.
- Surveyed the relevant team members to determine their needs
- Designed a Postgres database structure
- Implemented routes to fetch and return data relating to usage of the Exatype NGS HIV product
- Implemented routes for adding and updating records related to billing and credits.
Created user interface to work with the internal API use using Ember.js
Created new user interface for the Exatype NGS SARS-CoV-2 product

Frontend developer

Hyrax Biosciences, May 2015 - October 2017

Joined Hyrax Biosciences as the first employee.

Created style guide for company products
Created of the first iteration of the user interface for the Exatype NGS HIV product using Ember.js.
Created the company brand identity.
Designed the logos of the company and the Exatype product.
Created the company homepage using the Hugo static website generator.
Created various marketing and branding materials
- Business cards
- Email signatures
- PowerPoint templates
Created first iteration of the user interface for the Exatype Sanger HIV product using Ember.js.
- Established a centralised code structure for Ember.js user interfaces, to enable code sharing and consistency in user experience across multiple Ember.js applications.

Web designer and developer

Self employed, April 2012 - May 2015

Worked as a freelance web designer and developer
Created websites for a range of small companies and organisations (https://andrewpaterson.co.za)

Head teacher, One-day programme

Gyeonggi English Village, Paju, Korea, October 2009 - April 2012

Operational management of a team of approximately 25 teachers, working in an educational theme park environment.
Creating daily schedules based on incoming bookings.
Creating learning materials for various programmes.
Creating support materials to assist teachers in creating learning materials.
Communicating with upper management on upcoming events and schedule changes.
Conducting performance reviews at set intervals for all team members.
Dealing with teacher requests and complaints.
Handling low level disciplinary issues.
Conducting daily team meetings to discuss operational matters.
Onboarding and training new team members.

Teacher

Gyeonggi English Village, Paju, Korea, October 2008 - October 2009

Teaching classes and workshops to visiting school groups.
Engaging in one on one conversation role play with people of all ages.
Designing ESL learning content and materials for various programmes.

Development work

Exatype platform

End-to-end cloud based platform

Ember.js, JavaScript, QUnit

The biggest project of my last year at Hyrax Biosciences was the design and implementation a single platform to combine all of the company’s customer facing products, and create a unified account management system.

This work has not yet been deployed, but with the consent of the company I have created 5 annotated screen casts of the platform UI, which outline key features of the platform, and provide some insights into the challenges involved and my approach to solving them.

The videos all demo the UI which I was exclusively responsible for.

I also designed and built large parts of the API which backs the UI, and co designed the database structure with one other colleague.

Account creation and scientific analysis

Collaborative features in the Exatype platform

Managing initial UI state with local storage and url query params

Generating PDFs from a dynamic application

The Exatype UI test suite

Ember Changeset Webforms

Validating webforms

https://ember-changeset-webforms.com

https://github.com/andrew-paterson/ember-changeset-webforms

Ember.js, JavaScript, QUnit testing framework

My most significant piece of open source work. This Ember.js addon enables the creation of feature rich webforms in a declarative manner, with minimal code.

Adding validation rules to form fields.
Controlling the events which trigger validation on a field.
Fires a range of optional callback functions in response to various events.
Repeatable fields.
Hiding or showing fields explicitly, or based on the value of other fields.
A robust test suite with over 100 tests.

Full documentation and live demos are available at https://ember-changeset-webforms.com

Validated Changeset Webforms

Validating webforms

https://github.com/andrew-paterson/validated-changeset-webforms

JavaScript, TypeScript

The base class for https://ember-changeset-webforms.com.

It is built in vanilla TypeScript and JavaScript, and so it could serve as the base class for an implementation of something like https://ember-changeset-webforms.com in any JavaScript framework.

QUnit Nodejs UI

Enhanced test suite tooling

https://github.com/andrew-paterson/qunit-nodejs-ui

QUnit testing framework, JavaScript, Nodejs, Express, Web sockets

This project adds the functionality of the QUnit browser UI to QUnit tests run in Nodejs.

This is achieved by spinning up both a web server and a modified version of the QUnit browser UI, using an Express server, with a web socket connect established between the two.

The node script which runs the tests can then post results to the server using a standard HTTP request, and the server forwards the results to the UI via the web socket connection.

Finance tracking application

Data visualisation and access

https://finance-tracker-demo.ajp-sandbox.co.za/

Ember.js, JavaScript, Data visualisation, MirageJS, Google OAuth, Google Drive API, QUnit testing framework

A web application which takes CSV bank statements and presents them in an easy to use table, with sorting, filtering and pagination.

It also enables the user to create metadata related tot he payments, for example by adding tags. Doing this allows various aspects of payment data to be visualised in interactive plots.

Features include:

Tag creation
Tagging payments individually
Creating “Smart tags” which define rules by which apply tags to payments dynamically, thus avoiding repetitive tagging of similar payments.
Creating “Monthly breakdowns” - stacked bar charts which show monthly spends related to specified tags.
Viewing running balances of the bank accounts which payments belong to.
Viewing monthly aggregates - the amount by which income exceeded expenses or vice versa, on a monthly basis.

The real version app allows authentication via Google Oauth, and then allows the user to select data from their Google Drive account. This can be accessed at https://finance-tracker.ajp-sandbox.co.za.

For convenience, a demo version of the app exists at https://finance-tracker-demo.ajp-sandbox.co.za. The demo does not requite Google Oauth,and is preloaded with data.

How Exatype works animation

Browser animation with JavaScript and HTML

https://hyraxbio.com/exatype-platform/

JavaScript

An animated explanation of the four step process employed by the Exatype analysis tool, which takes DNA sequence data and produces results. Scroll to the “How Exatype works” section of the page.