It’s our pleasure to introduce you to Henry Bevan, the newest member of the Filter family! We welcomed Henry into the team back in December, and since then he’s hit the ground running.
In this article, we hear from Henry about his background, his interests as a developer, and how he’s settling into his new role here at Filter.
I’m a Full-Stack Senior Software Developer. It’s my objective to work on both apps and websites for the agency, developing features that our clients need.
I studied at the University of Southampton, where I earned a master’s degree in Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence.
When I left university, I started working at the Health Protection Agency, which is a government agency tasked with protecting England and Wales from infectious diseases. I was a web developer there, working on their intranet. The organisation has since been renamed, but it’s the agency currently supporting our COVID-19 testing and response.
From that role, I moved on to a company called Preqin, which tracks investors and fund managers in the alternative assets markets, working in areas like private equity, venture capital, real estate, and infrastructure. Whilst there, I worked on the public website, the ‘product’ website, and the internal CRM.
After a few years at Preqin, I partnered with a friend from school to launch our own business. It was an advert-funded music download service. Unfortunately, it never really took off due to Spotify and Apple Music becoming ubiquitous. We tried a few pivots into making related mobile apps, but never quite managed to find anything that stuck.
Following that venture, I took a front-end role working on a civil engineering construction site’s management app, which I liked, but found myself missing the back-end-related development tasks that I’d enjoyed in previous roles. That’s what led me to Filter.
When I was working at Preqin, in the financial services sector, I wrote a ‘fund performance’ internal rate of return (IRR). This was a computation query in TSQL (Microsoft’s SQL language variant) that provided a way of measuring how well a fund was doing, in terms of giving better returns than just keeping cash.
We were having a number of overflow problems within the computation with some large funds with lots of fund performance data. I managed to find a solution that used logarithms to ‘shrink’ the computation, which essentially meant that adding logs of numbers could become the same as multiplying them together.
When I was working for my own company, we implemented a WebRTC-based video streaming component that allowed our users to live-stream from the app. I wrote the control system for it, which included functionality like starting the stream, sending messages, adding a second stream, and so on. I was quite proud of that.
The key element that attracted me to the role was the variety of technologies. There’s a great blend of different technologies used amongst the products being developed here, and the opportunity to work across the whole technology stack was really exciting.
At the moment, I like JavaScript.
I also like the formalisms that TypeScript offers over JavaScript, but I think I’ll need some more exposure to it first to be sure.
Currently I use a Mac as my main development machine, but I use VS Code as the main development environment, because I find it good for JavaScript development. I’m still trying it out for PHP development but, so far, I’ve not run into any issues.
I’m interested in seeing what happens in the VR space. Not specifically what Meta (formerly Facebook) develops, but what happens in the overall space that utilises VR technology.
I’ve played a few games in VR and found them very interesting experiences, and it brings a different dimension to the game-play.
I’m also interested in seeing what developments occur with electric vehicles, as I was recently in a Tesla for the first time and was quite impressed.
Get a feel for the kind of exciting technology projects Henry will be working on in his new role, by checking out some of our most interesting client success stories in recent years.
You can also read more about the company values that help us attract talented developers like Henry to our team by clicking here.
