Royal Navy - Navy Digital Services

Due to the nature of the work done for the Royal Navy I cannot disclose much information about the projects themselves.

To date I have worked on two projects as a Full Stack Developer working in TypeScript to provide prototype user interfaces created in React and GraphQL APIs to provide server-side data.

Project 1: End to End GEOINT

Aim

End to End GEOINT project's goal was to build a concept demonstrator for streamlining the ingest, discovery and dissemination of GEOINT (Geospatial Intelligence) to the naval platforms before and during time at sea.

My Contribution

I was the soul Frontend Developer working alongside a team including Architects, User Interface Designers and Data Analysts. When I joined the project there was 3 months until a demonstration of the research carried out by the team and a prototype tool was required for this demonstration.

The team had already created UI designs but after meeting with users I improved upon these by streamlining the process from a tool that required individual datasets to be selected to one which would provide all data possibly required to travel to a specific destination. Taking the emphasis off the user to know what data they would need and instead ask them only to input in non-exact terms the generic regions of the world they would be travelling to.

I built the frontend and backend of the prototype in the 3 month time window and demonstrated it to high ranking Naval Officers.

Project 2: Anti-Submarine Warfare Project Spearhead - Annex C

ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare) Spearhead is one of the key research and development project in the Royal Navy at the time of writing. It was mentioned by the First Sea Lord by name as one of the projects the Navy is investing most into.

The Spearhead project is a multi-annex initiative to improve the Royal Navy’s anti-submarine warfare capabilities through improvements in Sonar technology, notably though the use of Multi-static sonar. Ordinarily sonar calculations are performed by a single sonar unit as the source location is known. Multi-static sonar allows multiple sonar to be transmitting or receiving sound waves and still be able to perform calculations of foreign objects in the water by sharing the transmission location.

Annex C specifically is tasked with converting ship data into a common standard and communicating the commands for sonar pings and the metadata of each ping to facilitate the sonar calculations.

My Contribution

• Built a React Typescript frontend for trial and demonstration purposes utilising the Ministry of Defence Design System.
• Built 3 Typescript APIs for the system. An Apollo GraphQL API to communicate with all other services, an ingest API reading data from a message queue and an egress API converting the Spearhead messages from JSON into custom binary for radio transmission.