Nursing Code

Martin Feckie

Software Developer, Healthcare Professional, Mentor

About Me

I'm strongly motivated by helping people and building things! I seek opportunities to do meaningful work and love to get the best out of myself and others.

I started my career as a carpenter and then trained as Registered Nurse. After 15 years in increasingly senior roles in healthcare I made a transition to software development.

Since making the move to software development, I've worked across a ranges of industries from government departments and banking sector through to healthcare and education technology. Doing impactful work that helps other to be happier, healthier and more self actualizing really motivates me

I'm an avid learner and can be found constantly reading about new languages, frameworks and techniques in software development. I maintain my interest in healthcare and keep up to date on evidence based care.

In recent years I've become a CrossFit convert. I started off lightly, but now try and attend 5 days a week. I've gained a lot of cardiovascular fitness, improved my muscle mass and feel the benefits of improved health on a daily basis. Being physically active has been of huge importance since becoming a remote worker.

Open Source

I have written and maintain a number of open source projects

  • Ammoniex Rust based Elixir extension to sanitize HTML
  • RRule Rust based Elixir extension for working with recurrence rules for calendars
  • Phoenix Wings Dart / Flutter client for interacting with Phoenix channels
  • PINXS Elixir based client for making payments using Pin Payments
  • Fast SASS Faster plugin for ember-cli SASS processing
  • Handlebars formatter VS-Code plugin for formatting ember templates

Tech Community Contributions

  • Very active in the Elixir and Ember communities
  • Spent 3 years running the Ruby on Rails meetup in Perth
  • Created and ran the Elixir meetup in Perth for 2 years
  • Was a co-organiser of RailsGirls and DjangoGirls in Perth
  • Mentored at RailsGirls in Melbourne

Formal Eduation

  • Masters of Health Services Management – Monash University (2012)
  • Diploma of Higher Education – Nursing (Adult) – University College of St Martin, UK

Recent Employment History

CompanyTitleFurther informationDates
3P LearningTech Lead 3P Learning is an education technology company that provides online learning resources for schools and the home market serving over 5 million learners in 130 countries. I look after a team who primarily take care of teacher and student management. We build out the administration interfaces for multiple products. The team also has responsibility for managing Single Sign On and a large number of microservices.

Notable achievements

  • Lead the widespread migration to TypeScript for our frontend projects
  • Technical leadership that keeps us up to date with modern technologies and best practices
  • Migrated a number of very old libraries to allow ongoing improvements and maintenance
  • Helping the team to try out new techniques and technologies
  • Enabled our frontend projects to use type safe templating
  • Provided guidance and improvements for our Elixir codebase
  • Introduced a number of new tools to improve our development experience
  • I'm a strong advocate for my team and ensure that they are able to do their best work by minimizing barrier and pushing for organisation level change
Jan 2022 - present
HotDocSenior Developer I've worked as a full stack developer using Ruby on Rails, Ember.js and Elixir to help doctors and medical centres improve patient care .

Notable achievements

  • Built out our repeat prescriptions service. I introduced Elixir into our stack as it was an excellent fit for creating high reliability systems which needs to working as part of a distributed system. It was also an excellent choice for fault tolerance when interacting with third parties (like payment processors)
  • Ran internal course teaching other developers how to use Elixir
  • I take the lead in setting our direction for Ember usage, keeping up with the community and ensuring we can maintain best practices.
  • Drove the adoption of TypeScript across our Ember projects
  • I have mentored many junior and early career developers
  • I've helped ensure our codebase(s) are well tested and ensure that we are following practices that allow for confident continuous deployment
  • Helped get visual regression testing across the majority of our frontend projects
  • Authored numerous internal and open source libraries

Talks

I love to teach folks about things and regularly give company wide talks on interesting topics.

  • TypeScript
  • Telomeres, ageing and resilience
  • Surgical Anaesthesia
  • Database Design and SQL
  • Using Rust with Elixir
  • Practical Empathy
  • Evidence Based Medicine
  • Anatomy of an Ember Application
  • Highly Concurrent Web Scraping
March 2016 - Dec 2021
ThoughtWorksSenior Consultant Application Developer
  • I worked with a diverse range of technologies to solve complex problems for clients
  • I worked with clients ranging from start-ups and government departments to large enterprises with millions of users.
  • I worked with many technologies along the way, including Go, Elixir, Ruby, Docker, CI platforms.
  • I taught a group of developers how to work effectively with Ember.js
  • Speaker at a tech conference on the topic of Erlang and Elixir
Oct 2014 - March 2016
Peel Health CampusDirector of Perioperative Services I managed a very busy operating suite, helping to make the facility the highest throughput unit in the region

Notable achievements

  • Major capital works project to upgrade the central sterile supply department
  • Led a major project to care for patients experience long wait times at other facilities
  • Ensured we passed accreditation and maintained high standards of care
  • Revamped many internal systems automating away much wasteful manual work
  • Created a tool for predicting surgery times, allowing us to do 10% more surgery with the same resources
December 2011 - October 2014
Royal Melbourne HospitalDirector of Nursing I worked in a number of roles over 8 years, from frontline nursing in anaesthesia up to Director of Nursing for Medicine and Community Care .

Notable achievements

  • Taking a struggling department with severe HR problems and a major budget deficit to a high functioning unit, within budget, whilst maintaining staffing levels and eventually having a waitlist of people who wanted to work in the unit
  • Major refurbishment of CSSD, increasing capacity to allow us to support more operating rooms
  • Significant contribution to the planning of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center operating suite and sterile supply department
  • Commissioning two additional operating rooms and planning for the installation an intra-operative MRI scanner
  • Researcher for a number of internationally noteworthy studies
  • Supporting the expansion of hospital in the home services
  • Speaker a number of medical conferences
February 2002 - October 2010

Medical Literature

I was a contributor to a number of academic studies during my time in healthcare, as a Research Nurse.

My role was primarily recruiting people into studies, monitoring and data collection. I also contributed to the design of some studies.

ArticleAuthorsJournalContribution
Nitrous oxide and long-term morbidity and mortality in the ENIGMA trial.Leslie K, Myles PS, Chan MTV, Forbes A, Paech MJ, Peyton P, et al.Anesthesia & Analgesia. 2011 Feb;112(2):387-93.Research Nurse
Unintentional hypothermia: implications for perianesthesia nurses.Feckie M.Journal of PeriAnesthesia Nursing. 2010 Feb;25(1):3; author reply -4.Author
Dissociating the effects of nitrous oxide on brain electrical activity using fixed order time series modeling.Liley DTJ, Leslie K, Sinclair NC, Feckie M.Computers in Biology & Medicine. 2008 Oct;38(10):1121-30.Research Nurse
Dreaming during anesthesia and anesthetic depth in elective surgery patients: a prospective cohort study.Leslie K, Skrzypek H, Paech MJ, Kurowski I, Whybrow T.Anesthesiology. 2007 Jan;106(1):33-42.Research Nurse
Dreaming during anaesthesia in adult patients.Best Practice & Research. 2007 Sep;Clinical Anaesthesiology. 21(3):403-14.Leslie K, Skrzypek H.Research Nurse
Postoperative complications and mortality in older patients having non-cardiac surgery at three Melbourne teaching hospitals.McNicol L, Story DA, Leslie K, Myles PS, Fink M, Shelton AC, et al.Medical Journal of Australia. 2007 May 7;186(9):447-52.Research Nurse
No sex differences in memory formation during general anesthesia.Stonell CA, Leslie K, He C, Lee L.Anesthesiology. 2006 Nov;105(5):920-6.Research Nurse
Effect of spinal flexion on the conus medullaris: a case series using magnetic resonance imaging.Fettes PDW, Leslie K, McNabb S, Smith PJ.Anaesthesia. 2006 Jun;61(6):521-3.Research subject
Rationale, design, and organization of the PeriOperative ISchemic Evaluation (POISE) trial: a randomized controlled trial of metoprolol versus placebo in patients undergoing noncardiac surgery.Investigators PT, Devereaux PJ, Yang H, Guyatt GH, Leslie K, Villar JC, et al.American Heart Journal. 2006 Aug;152(2):223-30.Research Nurse
Dreaming during anaesthesia in patients at high risk of awareness.Leslie K, Myles PS, Forbes A, Chan MTV, Swallow SK, Short TG.Anaesthesia. 2005 Mar;60(3):239-44.Research Nurse
Bispectral index monitoring to prevent awareness during anaesthesia: the B-Aware randomised controlled trial.Myles PS, Leslie K, McNeil J, Forbes A, Chan MTV.Lancet. 2004 May 29;363(9423):1757-63.Research Nurse
The effect of perioperative beta-blockers on patients undergoing noncardiac surgery - is the answer in?Devereaux PJ, Leslie K, Yang H.Canadian Journal of Anaesthesia. 2004 Oct;51(8):749-55.Research Nurse