Simon Hazzard

Simon (Sam) Hazzard is a dynamic full-stack software engineer known for left-field thinking, creativity, innovation and expertise in software design. With 25 years of experience in multiple industries from defence, policing and detention data solutions to hardware business support and automation. He has earned a reputation for delivering complete solutions, as well as providing augmentation for third party software that fails to fully deliver.

Simon Hazzard's journey in the world of software began in his late 20's after serving his country in the military. He had from his teens a passion for coding on the Sinclair Spectrum that provided the stimulus to join a well established defence and detention contractor, Unilink Systems and Software, as part of the initial team designing and delivering distributed data applications for HMP, the CBRN Centre and Police forces up and down the country - setting him off on a path that would lead to a thriving career.

Assisted in achieving Automotive SPICE (ASPICE - process and quality of software development) and ISO26262 (functional safety for critical systems) accreditation for Microchip Technology Inc. as a part of the FuSa team, and by delivering a Polarion augmentation solution for an established requirements process.

Simon Hazzard has worked professionally with C, C++, C# and Borland Delphi.
This work included extensive MS SQL server work, database design and deployments. Most recently, the last 6 or so years he has mainly spent with Python (2.7 to 3.14) and Django building web application database front ends, API integrations and automating business processes.
Simon designs builds practical full-stack solutions from bare metal or VPS installation, to database design, deploy and management, through to designing software architecture, managing development and testing, to completing the stack with continuous integration and deployment and total management of the solution.

Simon is continuously learning.
For example, he wanted to learn how AWS works, so he built ScoopTracker, a global ice cream van tracking application for consumers, and ice cream fleet management software for vendors. S3, E2, RDS, IAM, advanced DNS and SSL certifications all in, as well as learning Dart, Flutter and how to use Android Studio to build the Android application. Then learned to navigate Google's ridiculous Play Store acceptance and deployment procedures. Takeaway? AWS is brilliant, but it's way too hard-core, overkill and expensive to be running pet projects on. So he built a Linux VPS and learned how to deploy it to that instead in the same way (SSL, sub-nets, remote server deployment for tools (SVN, Jenkins, etc.)). This page is hosted there.

And that was only from March to October 2025.

When not coding, he's probably dreaming up stupid ideas, tutoring Python beginners, or quietly judging other people’s indentation.
Tea is essential. Nay, vital.