Software engineer · Made Tech · ex-DVSA · Swansea
Welsh / Chinese roots. Engineer first.
郭苏恒
01 / Signal
National services, clear systems— shipped with the people who use them in mind.
From apprenticeship at DVSA to Made Tech on DVLA — full-stack delivery, incident ownership, and mentoring that turns complex work into something the whole squad can carry.
历程 About me (&) my path
Reliable under pressure.Generous with the craft.
'19
Apprentice at 17
Joined DVSA on an ICT apprenticeship. Java in production, Oracle training in London, first AWS Lambdas.
@dvsa
'22
Software Developer
Promoted at DVSA. REST APIs, SQL at national scale, Jenkins pipelines, and Selenium suites that stuck.
@dvsa
'23
Event-driven CVS
VTA / VTM on Commercial Vehicle Services — SNS into SQS, TypeScript microservices, Terraform with DevOps.
@events
'24
Made Tech · DVLA
Drivers First Provisional — Rails UI, TypeScript serverless, Argo releases, and the teammate others call first.
@madetech
'25
Still raising the bar
Medical declaration live, generics wiping duplication, calm under PagerDuty — and mentoring that sticks.
@now
作品 Selected work
Built foroutcomes.
Real delivery for DVLA and DVSA — medical declarations on DFP, event-driven vehicle testing services, TypeScript that doesn’t duplicate itself, and the production discipline that keeps national systems calm.
Made Tech · DVLA
Medical Declaration, Live
Led the bilingual medical questionnaire on DVLA’s Drivers First Provisional Rails service — a flagship delivery called out by leads as the recent highlight.
Made Tech · DVLA
TypeScript Without Duplication
Led a specialised session and delivery on generics across the channel API — cutting duplicated serverless code and lifting the team’s TypeScript craft.
Made Tech · DVLA
Legacy Off the Books
Migrated Drivers First Provisional into the new external UI — decommissioning legacy paths and unlocking serious cost savings for the client.
Made Tech · DVLA
Calm Under PagerDuty
Owned production when it hurt — diagnosing live issues with Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Log Insights, coordinating releases, and stepping up when the lead was away.
DVSA
Events That Fan Out
Designed AWS event-driven flows for DVSA Commercial Vehicle Services — SNS into SQS for true one-to-many notification distribution on VTA / VTM.
DVSA
Test Suite, Owned
Led the Java + Selenium API test suite at DVSA — planning sessions, progress catch-ups, and support for juniors on apprenticeship routes.
DVSA
Ship With Confidence
Stood up Jenkins CI/CD with Selenium, Cucumber, and solid unit coverage — turning releases from events into a habit across DVSA services.
DVSA
Apprenticeship to Engineer
Joined DVSA at 17 on an ICT apprenticeship — Java in production, Oracle training in London, and serverless Lambdas before most peers had shipped anything.
经历 Experience
Software Engineer
DVLA client delivery on Drivers First Provisional and licence renewal — Rails UI, TypeScript serverless, Argo releases, mentoring across squads, and calm production ownership.
Software Developer
Commercial Vehicle Services (VTA / VTM): event-driven AWS, TypeScript microservices, Terraform with DevOps, CI/CD, and Java Selenium test leadership.
Junior Software Developer
Apprenticeship from 17 — Java services, AWS Lambda, REST over SQL, customer support via ServiceNow, City & Guilds Level 3 and Java SE 8 Fundamentals.
评价 From the people I’ve worked with
“Daniel is a capable, consistent contributor with range across feature development, API work, and test infrastructure. The medical declaration delivery within DFP is the recent highlight. He provides a significant amount of guidance to other team members and consistently delivers valuable feedback during reviews.”
— Lead software engineer, DVLA
“He took the time to bring me up to speed on multiple areas of the project when I was getting started, and he’s still someone I can reach out to when I have questions. That kind of ongoing support has made a real difference to my confidence and growth here.”
— Software engineer, Made Tech
“He has proven to be exceptionally good at understanding the bigger picture, breaking complex problems down into smaller tasks, and most importantly knows when to stop, take a step back, and look at the problem from a different angle. He has a keen eye for perfection when peer reviewing code before production.”
— Software engineer, DVLA
“You are able to work independently and lead on feature implementation with minimal input… You have knowledge of several products and are comfortable contributing to discussions more widely than the immediate team.”
— Lead software engineer, Made Tech
所长 Expertise
What I bring to a team
Product & web
Rails and Angular interfaces people use for real licences and vehicle testing — bilingual where it matters.
Services & events
Serverless and microservices that fan out cleanly — SNS, SQS, EventBridge, Lambda — with generics where duplication used to hide.
Data & platforms
Relational and document stores for national services, plus the search and logs that make production debuggable.
Cloud & delivery
Infrastructure and pipelines that make releases boring — Terraform, containers, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Argo.
Quality & ops
Tests that catch regressions early, vulns closed with Snyk, and PagerDuty handled with a cool head.
Leadership
The teammate others call first — mentoring, PR craft, release ownership, and stepping up when the lead is away.