Brendan Collinson
This week I interviewed our Data Analyst Brendan Collinson. Here’s a little insight into what Brendan does for Ebuyer and what interests him outside of work.
What is your role within Ebuyer?
Data Analyst
How old are you?
29
What is your favourite film?
I love Quentin Tarantino films but the dialogue in Pulp Fiction is the best (Royale with cheese anyone?), or for cheesy 80’s – Kick Boxer (do the Van Damme dance!)
What are your hobbies?
Snooker, Football and Films.
What is your favourite food?
A good Ruby Murray, though a good bottle of red always goes down well!
What date did you join Ebuyer?
21st December 2009
Tell us a bit about your education?
AAT Foundation and a Foundation Certificate in Software Testing
Career highlight?
Working with Asda, project managing the integration of stock management and movement behind their Asda Electricals website and the external company I worked for.
Testing the functionality of Chip and PIN via kiosks before they became commonplace in popular retail stores!
Oh, and joining Ebuyer!
What equipment do you use?
- HP Desktop PC with Windows XP 2002 – yes Windows
- One Samsung 22” Widescreen Monitor
- A swivel chair (I’m getting a bit thorough here already)
- MS Excel 2003
- MS Access 2003 (great for analyzing large amounts of data that Excel can’t handle)
- Navicat for MySQL
- Business Objects
- Firefox
- More formula functions, figures, SQL syntax and Pivot Tables than you could ever imagine existed, or care to think of…
- Lots of Coffee! Beats Red Bull (minus vodka) hands down and tastes better!
What are you working on right now?
Writing this for the blog! Work wise the usual bunch of reports and stats that relate to the previous weeks’ trading.
Tell us a bit about yourself?
After leaving school, I spent 6 years working in various accounts positions in both manufacturing and retail. I moved to the now defunct Miller Brothers (Electrical) when I was 21 for the start of two stints and in 2004, I changed career direction and moved into IT project management. Here I worked on various internal and external projects including areas such as rolling out Chip and PIN hardware and training to a number of retail stores nationwide, online fraud prevention and most notably the Asda work as mentioned earlier.
I left Miller Brothers after 4 years and had two other roles:
The first involved producing headline reports, reporting on hardware break/fix performance against service level agreements at one of HBOS’s Data Centres. Other than this, I’ve spent a period as a User Acceptance Testing Analyst at a financial services company. A lot of my work there involved testing systematic improvements to cater for legislative changes for both onshore and offshore business.
I returned to Miller Brothers at age 27 for a brief period before the company went into administration. Following my consequential redundancy I spent a number of months looking for a new role and then Ebuyer found me, or I found them! The rest is history…
and last but not least…
What two items would you take if stranded on a desert island?
I’d take Bear Grylls himself! Would I need anything else? Well… Martine McCutcheon would do – I’d share her with him!
Please feel free to leave a comment 😀
