Evan Brumley is WSP’s Software Engineering Discipline Lead in the Digital team. The team help navigate our clients’ digital transformation journeys – from solving complex problems and bringing insights from data together with engineering and environmental services, to optimising operations through digitisation. Evan has been instrumental in the Energy Rating System project that helps to simplify and streamline the complex processes undertaken to assess a product’s energy efficiency and compliance to business rules.
“Our early projects tended to have an environmental focus,” he says. “We ran one that enabled users to track environmental legislation across different domains, another that involved tracking greenhouse gas emissions from the whisky industry, and one that helped users understand which varieties of tuna are the most environmentally friendly.”
He was also involved in revolutionising the work of WSP’s health and safety auditing team. Having observed a day in the life of doing an audit, Evan says, “I designed a whole web application around that experience, building up the user interface based on what I could see our people doing on site.”
The result was transformative – replacing an arduous and time-consuming paper-based process with a simple digital solution. “This is what I get a kick out of,” says Evan, “seeing how other people work, then building an application that can make their jobs easier and improve people’s lives.”
It’s an example that Evan likes to share with students. “Even though it might not sound as exciting as developing video games, it’s equally engaging and the rewards can be even greater.”
Making a difference with digital started early
Before joining WSP, Evan completed a degree in mechatronics. During his time as a student, he was already flexing his tech muscles – developing a better, digital method to improve the residential college experience for students.
”What I love about programming is that I can put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together and come up with something that will make a real change.”
Diving into Python and the Energy Rating System
It’s been an exciting and challenging project to have worked on the Energy Rating System project. “It was all hands on deck for our very small team,” says Evan. “Energy Rating was an organisation-changing project because it was on a totally different scale to anything else we’d ever built.”
Evan had previously used Python to program his applications, and the team pivoted to the language, replacing a home-grown programming framework using PHP. “Python is now the absolute cornerstone of our business and we’re now very involved in the Python ecosystem in Australia,” says Evan. “This is one of the big success stories of our businesses. Python is used across engineering, scientific computing, data and analytics – and it’s a great fit for us because it’s ideal for every one of our business sectors.”
Python programming is what drives the complex back end of the Energy Rating website. The site is where equipment manufacturers register all the technical details about their products for assessment of energy efficiency, which determines the ‘star rating’ displayed on the very recogniseable stickers we see on fridges, washing machines, air-conditioners and all other large electrical products in Australia. Users can also browse the site to locate products and compare their energy efficiency.
“We manage all the forms that are used to manage the registration and assessment processes and then publish the results online,” says Evan. “It’s an ongoing process of updating the system as legislation and standards evolve, configuring everything correctly, and maintaining the system’s integrity.”
The product has now been running for 13 years. “In software terms, it’s ancient,” says Evan, “but it has been running and stable for so long because it’s been very well maintained, kept up to date, and the technology stack that it runs on is still absolutely industry leading”.
New frontiers, ongoing passions
Evan is looking forward to continuing in a technical role where he can still get a buzz out of programming, and he is keen to spend more time engaging and helping the next generation within the wider programming community and the Python community in Australia.
He is also eager to see more junior colleagues get great opportunities with a good blend of projects to build up their skills and grow WSP’s digital business. “One of the joys of working in our business is the variety of different projects,” he says. “Our software engineering team is growing and taking on bigger and more complex projects, so there’s always something exciting happening and a new technical challenge to overcome.”
Evan’s passion for his work shines bright and will surely inspire the next generation of WSP’s programmers. As he says, “being able to build something, put it into the world, and see it make a real difference is so fulfilling.”
