Oppian People

Oppian's staff are highly skilled multi-disciplinary mobile technologists with many years experience of software at the heart of the industry. We have a passion for mobile and cloud computing and a real dedication to help our customers efficiently realise their projects. We are also able to cover all technology bases between mobile and cloud and advise our customers on complete end to end technology proposition.

Mal Minhas

Mal is a mobile software veteran with fifteen years experience of engineering leadership, systems architecture and software development. Mal's technical expertise covers wireless comms, device integration, runtimes and OS platform evolution through to backend infrastructure, web frameworks and cloud computing.

During his career, Mal has worked on a wide variety of mobile technologies and devices within companies including Psion, Symbian, Apple and Adobe. He started out in mobile as part of the small Psion Series 5 engineering team that built what became the Symbian OS platform. Later he became a founder member of Symbian's System Architecture Group collaborating closely with key stake holders such as Nokia and SonyEricsson. He moved on to work within Apple's Applications team on phone connectivity and latterly, at Adobe, he focussed on mobility service architecture. Currently Mal is engaged as CTO at LiMo Foundation. He has maintained an active engagement with Linux, Python and Open Source throughout.

Python, Open Source, Web Services (REST/SOAP/JSON), Linux, Perl, C/C++, JavaScript/ActionScript, Symbian/S60, Mac OS X, Shortlink Comms (IrCOMM/IrDA/ Bluetooth/ZigBee), GSM/GPRS/3G, WiFi, TCP/IP, XML, Synchronisation (SyncML/vCard/vCal) XML, Flash, Web frameworks (Twisted, Django)

Stephen Hartley

Stephen has been a senior engineer and architect at Psion, Symbian, Mobile Innvation and Adobe Systems and has lead multi-million pound projects creating system and application user interfaces for the Nokia 7710, 9500 and 9300 phones; designing many areas of the OS whilst managing internal and external development teams.

During his career he has worked on virtually all areas of modern OS development from kernel and device driver debugging, to security, communications, networking, and messaging technologies along with PIM applications and System and Application UI

Stephen has developed on many platforms including Symbian OS (release 1 to release 9), Nokia S60 (v2 to v5), Linux (Debian, Ubuntu), Mac OS X, iPhone OS and Unix (HP-UX) using many languages including C/C++, Objective-C, Python, Perl, JavaScript/ActionScript.

He has also been enjoying his exploration of the clouds using Amazon and RightScale services, and would love an excuse to use LLVM in anger.

Python, Perl, C/C++, Objective-C, JavaScript/ActionScript, Symbian, S60, Mac OS X, iPhone, Linux, RS232, IrCOMM/IrDA, Bluetooth, GSM/GPRS/EDGE, WiFi, TCP/IP, UDP, IPv4/IPv6, ICMP, IPSec, PPP, ZeroConf/Bonjour, UPnP, SSH, HTTP, SMTP/ESMTP, POP3, IMAP, MIME, SMS, MMS, SyncML, vCard, vCal, vCalendar, XML, DRM, SVG, EC2/AWS, Flash/Flash Cast, HTML, CSS, Django

Neil Davis

Following his computer science and mathematics degree from Leeds University, Neil worked at Psion creating the initial Symbian UI and the IrDA file transfer engine and then on to the Symbian/PC connectivity and synchronisation software.

After Symbian, Neil had a stint at Management Systems Designers implementing an XSLT-based publication system. Then Neil joined Stephen developing the Nokia 7710 UI at Mobile Innovations before developing Flash and large-scale server implementations including authentication and billing systems.

Since founding Oppian, Neil was the lead architect and developer for the Live Talkback product, developing both the server and the prototype iPhone client. The system uses Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and RightScale cloud computing services with the backend implemented using Django, JQuery and PostgreSQL.

Python, Perl, C/C++, Objective-C, JavaScript/ActionScript, Java, Symbian, S60, Mac OS X, iPhone, Linux, Web Services (SOAP + REST), XML/XSLT, JSON, Cloud computing (EC2/AWS), Django, GeoLocation

Matthew Jacobi

Matt is a multi-disciplined software architect with strong experience developing and supporting both carrier-grade backend infrastructure for mobile services as well as mobile applications for the Apple iPhone, Google Android, Symbian OS, Adobe FlashLite/AIR and web. He understands the practical optimisation required for real mobile deployments and is able to architect solutions from start to finish, including the key areas of scaling, redundancy and capacity. He is able to add value in many areas of the team including the development cycle as well as the server administration and deployment side.

He has a strong knowledge across a broad spectrum of technologies including SOAP, REST, JSON, XML, XSLT, SQL as well as a multitude of programming languages both compiled and scripted. His preferred development languages include Python, Perl, JavaScript, Bash, PHP, C/C++ and Java. He has great experience with UNIX based operating systems, specifically Linux and Solaris. His in-depth development and deployment experience on both mobile and web-based clients and server-side gives him a detailed knowledge of the various transport mechanisms and how to use them most effectively for efficient communication.

While at Oppian, Matt has designed and implemented the server for Live Talkback. The system uses Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and RightScale cloud computing services with the backend implemented using Django and PostgreSQL and the frontend built using XHTML, CSS, AJAX and JQuery.

Linux, Django, Python/Perl/Lua scripting, Bash shell scripting, SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, SQLite, TCP/IP, HTML, CSS, HA, JQuery, JQuery UI, OpN, Web Services (SOAP + REST), XML (DOM/SAX) + JSON, Solaris, Cloud computing (EC2/AWS), C/C++, PHP, ColdFusion, Java, J2EE, WebLogic, Tomcat, Symbian, S60, Windows Mobile, Javascript/Actionscript, Flash/Flex/Flash Cast, SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, server administration