The DSoFt Team Profile

DSoFt Solutions is a flexible company of two highly talented software engineers, Karen Ackroyd and Steve Kinder
We have scientific and computing backgrounds, gathering and interpreting complex requirements
Each of us has 20 years experience at the forefront of technical software development in a research environment
We are all familiar with working throughout the software life cycle from specification through to testing and delivery
The team has a wide range of skills across the software industry

The DSoFt team have worked together in the synchrotron radiation computing group at Daresbury Laboratory, Cheshire for the past 10 years.

Skills and Experience

The DSoFt team has a wide variety of key computing skills in:

Object Oriented Programming: Java and C++
Procedural Programming: C, Fortran and Basic
Scripting: Unix Shell, Python and Jython
Agile Programming
Software Testing e.g. JUnit, TestNG
Operating Systems: UNIX/Linux, Windows, OS-9 and VMS
Tools e.g. Eclipse, JProbe, Microsoft software, Debuggers, XML Editors, CVS, SVN, Bugzilla
Markup Languages e.g. HTML and XML
Other: UML, Design Patterns, Databases and Access (JDBC, SQL), CORBA, Castor

and experience in:

Hardware/Equipment Control
Data Acquisition
Hardware Interfacing e.g. Detectors, Motion Control, Robotic Sample Changer, Firewire Camera, Digital Readout and I/O
Development of Graphical User Interfaces (Java Swing, MOTIF)
Process Automation
System Integration
Data Analysis
Device Drivers
Project management, including Prince II
Development and use of Communication Protocols e.g. via Serial, VME, CAMAC, Ethernet, TCP/IP, Libraries
Client/Server Programming
Computing GRID technologies

Biographies

Karen Ackroyd

Karen has a BSC Honours in Computational and Statistical Science from the University of Liverpool. Karen originally worked in Synchrotron machine control and since then in experiment control and data acquisition for the non-Crystalline Diffraction and Protein Crystallography science teams.

Steve Kinder

Steve has a BSC Honours in Physics from University of Essex and a PhD in Experimental Physics from the University of Reading. Steve has worked in Synchrotron experiment control and data acquisition for the Atomic and Molecular Spectroscopy and Protein Crystallography science teams.