10+ years cloud infrastructure experience as developer, engineer, technical lead & architect

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  Open Source Developer, Self
  

  2019-07 — Present

  Spending a few months developing tools to make engineering in the clouds easier. And other assorted tools

  • Built a mobile app to showcase user sourced data, using Flutter and Dart
  • Contributed to existing open source projects such as Gpodder and Gpodder.net
  • Built a tool to view twitter exports
  • Built a website to highlight the problems with FPTP
  • Built a tool to monitor activity on toxic internet communities

  Projects

  • Mobile location based-app

    Mobile app built on Flutter/Dart. With the backend on GCP (Firebase & Storage)

    Technologies: Android, Flutter, Dart, GCP,

    
    

    Built a prototype app for a customer. Mobile app built on Flutter/Dart with support for Android & iOS, but only built on Android for now. The app combined camera & location data, with a combination of authoritative and user submitted data to inform users about the venues which the app supported. The backend was provided by GCP, entirely storage based for scale & cost purposes, using Firebase for authentication. While the project is currently still a prototype, the front & backend are functional.

  • Gpodder & Gpodder.net updates

    https://gpodder.net

    Contribute bug fixes & features to Gpodder & Gpodder.net

    Technologies: Python, GTK, Django,
  • Offline Twitter Export Viewer

    https://gitlab.com/RiotingPacifist/twitter-export-viewer

    Simple tool to view twitter exports offline

  • Generic AWS Saml CLI (WIP)

    Generic SAML tool for AWS, to work with multiple providers and multiple backends using a modular pythonic design.

  • TheMajority.uk

    https://gitlab.com/TheMajority/themajority.uk

    Website generator combining markdown, Jinja & yaml. Also a website about proportional representation

  • Subreddit Monitor

    Serverless Python bot, to monitor subreddit activity for cross-posts and notify users

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  Volunteer & Volunteer Coordinator, 
  

  2022-01 — Present

  Volunteering at various organizations, including coordinating volunteers and donated resources.
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  Senior Cloud Engineer, DPR consulting
  

  2020-04 — 2021-10

  Full stack developer (including support & infrastructure engineering) for multiple customer facing serverless applications.

  • Picked up Typescript and React and to deliver front-end improvements
  • Improved build pipelines, to deliver CI while pushed quality left, by enforcing linting and coverage testing
  • (Collectively) improved our processes significantly to much better reflect agile best practices
  • Built and migrated to a multi-account structure with an access account deployed entirely as configuration

  Projects

  • Broker ID

    https://www.brokerid.co.uk/

    An SSO solution for Mortgage Brokers

  • Broker ID Data

    https://data.brokerid.co.uk

    Providing information from multiple sources for FCA regulated firms, both via a webapp and in backwards compatible extracts

  • Distribution Hub

    A service to enable brokers to search and track multiple lender systems mortgage application on

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  Cloud Systems Developer Lead, Cloudreach
  

  2014-03 — 2019-07

  Worked on customer projects as a Lead/Architect and mentored a small team.

  • Architect on several Enterprise engagement, at companies such as NBIM, BP, News UK, etc.
  • Delivered both the architecture and implementation on multiple Cloud Access models
  • Managed a team for 4 engineers, helping them get the most out of working for Cloudreach
  • Helped run a city government hackathon (TFL)

  
  

  Worked on customer projects as a Tech Lead/Architect. Managed a team of 3 or 4 engineers within Cloudreach, making sure they got the most out of their role.

  Projects

  • Norges Bank Investment Management, Cloud Migration

    Formed part of the CCOE supporting NBIM's datacentre exit onto immutable infrastructure in AWS

    Keywords: CCOE, Deployment Pipeline, Immutable,
    Technologies: AWS, Packer, Cloudformation, Ansible, Jinja, Python, Windows, Linux,

    
    

    NBIM had an aggressive migration strategy, based on a standardized pipeline approach in order to re-platform 150 applications into immutably deployed services within 8 months. As part of the CCOE, helped build and maintain the pipeline (Cloudformation, Ansible, Packer, Jinja, Powershell) in order to achieve this. As well as support teams migrating applications, migrate applications and ensure best practices were applied at an account level.

  • BP, AWS CIP

    Architect for BP's Cloud infrastructure Platform (AWS)

    Keywords: Strategy, RBAC, Multi-Tenanted, Platform, Shared Services, Landing Zone, Multi-Region,
    Technologies: AWS, IAM, Cloudformation, Windows, Linux, Python,

    
    

    Architect/Tech Lead on the AWS side of BP's Cloud infrastructure Platform (CIP), responsible for

    • Guiding high-level goals
    • Interfacing with other teams and gather requirements at a technical level
    • Aligning high-level & mid-Level architectures
    • RBAC engine in a Multi-Tenanted account
    • Supporting the team and ensure code quality for services and customers Transitioned the project from an EC2-focused offering in 1 region, with 4 supported OSes, to a managed cloud native datacentre, offering use of 20 AWS services, across 2 regions with 6 supported OSes, as well as aligning future visions towards a many-account model.

  • Cloudreach, Multi Cloud Lab Vending Engine

    Replace Long lived Multi-User Labs with an on-demand Multi Cloud Lab Vending Engine

    Keywords: Multi-cloud, Strategy, Portal, Landing Zone, Multi-Account, Serverless, SSO, API Design,
    Technologies: AWS, Azure, GCP, Account Vending Engine, JavaScript, Stateless, Python, Lambda, SAM,

    
    

    Transformed shared per-cloud lab accounts, into an SSO integrated multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) on-demand vending engine, improving security, while reducing cost and increasing accountability. In addition for pushing for the change on the business side, designed the API for integrating with the serverless per-cloud solutions, implement the central orchestration workflows in Google Apps script (JavaScript), Wrote the serverless wrapper (python) that provided the link between AWS's Landing Zone product and the orchestrator.

  • TFL, TFL hackathon

    Helped Run and Judge TFL Active Travel Hackathon

    Keywords: AWS, Hackathon, APIs,
    Technologies: AWS,

    
    

    Provided expertise for teams making use of AWS while building solutions using TFL, Met Office & Ordinance Survey's APIs.

  • Pearson, Pearson Governance Framework and Prototype

    Designed and prototyped Pearson's AWS governance strategy

    Keywords: Strategy, Multi-Tenanted, Platform, Shared Services, Landing Zone, Serverless,
    Technologies: AWS, Cloudformation, Windows, Linux, Python,

    
    

    Produced a cloud adoption and governance strategy, to reduce the unmanaged spend across 100+ accounts. Provided a design for account structure, access, networking, security, monitoring, cost allocation and deployment. Led team building a serverless monitoring and triage framework (similar to cloud guardian/current AWS whitepapers), and target account creation and hardening.

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  Role Owner (Cloud Systems Developers), Cloudreach
  

  2016-06 — 2019-07

  Worked with the leadership team to improve the System Developers role.

  • Helped Engineers get improve their technical skills though a hands-on training workshop program
  • Trained and mentored multiple sets of graduates

  
  

  Worked with the leadership team to improve the System Developers role. This included both technical tooling and non-technical initiatives.

  Projects

  • Personal Growth workshops

    Introduced monthly hands-on training workshops.

    Keywords: Personal Development, Training, Strategy, DevOps,
    

    
    

    By using in-house experts, to deliver 1/2 day, regional hands-on, realistic, workshops, the program gives engineers a chance to use emerging technologies on realistic use cases, rather than under idea situations. For example, it's easy to setup a Kubernetes demo, but most introductions, don't cover dealing with sidecars and statefull containers. The workshops also gave experienced team engineers a change to showcase their skills and produce content for our knowledgebase. As the workshops were run separately it was also an opportunity for the American and European offices to collaborate on training materials, without having to deal with time-zones for the delivery.

  • Graduate/FastTrack Trainer/coordinator

    Involved in the delivery of 6 Fast Track training programs.

    Keywords: Personal Development, Training,
    Technologies: AWS, IaC,

    
    

    The Graduate/Fast Track program was a 8-10 week training course initially for recent graduates and later for anybody keen to retrain and start working in cloud based DevOps. Responsible for at least one, two week course on either AWS or infrastructure as code, in every program, as the cloud computing progresses rapidly this meant refreshing course materials and delivering, a hands-on course to groups of 6-20. In addition to delivering the training also worked with the leadership team and managers to ensure graduates were placed onto appropriate projects.

  • Interview Process update

    Responsible for refining and updating the interview process

    Keywords: Interviews, Metrics,
    

    
    

    Refined the interview process through two major iterations, First standardizing the process across all our European and American offices, being more prescriptive in terms of scoring. The second introduced somewhat objective scoring criteria, while still giving interviewers enough scope to

  • Unified Chatroom system & Knowledge base

    Helped establish a company wide unified Chatroom system & Knowledge base.

    Keywords: ChatOps, Knowledge Sharing,
    Technologies: Slack,

    
    

    Standardizing the company on a single chat and knowledge base, made it much easier for new colleagues to get up to speed. Most of this was focusing on making the case for unifying the tooling (in this case Slack and Atlassian), making sure there was a path forward for all the teams involved that wasn't seen as a regression was important. The end result was much more cross-department knowledge sharing, mostly along technical lines, however it also helped organize events (both globally and office specific).

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  Internal hackathons/skunkworks Developer, Cloudreach
  

  2012-02 — 2019-07

  • Built Automated tanks that used image recognition to move and fire at each other.
  • Built various useful internal tools, that remained in use for years
  • Built a variety of IaC tools, that made deployments easier
  • Won a trip to Central America
  • Had project open sourced externally, by somebody that found it useful

  Projects

  • piRobotWars

    Automated tanks that used image recognition to move and fire at each other.

    Technologies: Rekognition, RaspberryPi, Soldering, Python, Lambda,
  • Calify

    Room booking system, based on Google calendar and android.

    Technologies: Android, Java, Google Apps,
  • Cloudformation Supremacy Engine

    Tools to facilitate better deployment of Cloudformation

    Technologies: Python, Terraform, Cloudformation,
  • Serverless Sceptre

    Tool for event driven Cloudformation deployments

    Technologies: Lamda, IaC, Cloudformation, Python,
  • Address Book, Contact sync, Holiday booking system

    Google apps automation used internally for booking holidays and syncing to mobile devices

    Technologies: Google Apps, JavaScript,
  • MusicBox

    Various iterations of the Office jukebox systems

    Technologies: RaspberryPi, Musicbox, Mopidy, JavaScript,
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  Cloud Systems Developer, Cloudreach
  

  2012-02 — 2014-03

  Worked on technical projects on AWS, Google Apps & Salesforce both individually and as part of a team.

  • Worked across 3 cloud platforms (Google, AWS, Salesforce)
  • Delivered difficult Google 2 Google migrations on tight deadlines

  Projects

  • Heymarket, Salesforce Roll-out for Media Group

    Re-implemented their sales processes in Salesforce and configured production & sandbox accounts

    Keywords: Processes,
    Technologies: Salesforce, Apex, SOQL,

    
    

    Part of the team doing the initial roll out to replace legacy CRM systems, did the initial requirements gathering, then matched the existing processes to those of Salesforce to fully automate the process for transforming digital media leads to cash. This involved both customizing Salesforce objects/processes and writing apex triggers and classes (along with the tests required by the platform).

  • News UK, Cross Team Support at a Large Media company

    
    

    Working as the cloud lead systems engineer inside a large media corporation, supported the infrastructure for all products being developed by partners on AWS, as well as the build servers used to support those (and other) deployments. Alongside supporting the running development environments, developed and rolled out a unified platform & development kit to simplify application and infrastructure, build, deployment, monitoring and support, while reducing the overall support burden at the company by, helping other teams standardize on the platform where practical.

  • Various (Milkround, News UK, etc), Google to Google Migrations

    Helped migrate various customers between Google Apps accounts

    Keywords: Migration, User Facing,
    Technologies: Google Apps, Python, AWS,

    
    

    Due to limitations in the Google Apps platform, the source account had to be completely deleted prior to the end of the migration, this means the entire migration had to be completed, including fixes and validation of data within about 60 hours. When combined with the user facing nature of mail migrations, this resulted in particularly difficult migrations, with tight deadlines

  • Various (Jamie Oliver group, Graze, etc), Google Migrations

    Helped migrate various customers between Google Apps accounts

    Keywords: Migration, User Facing,
    Technologies: Google Apps, Python, AWS,
  • Teletext Holidays, Teletext Holidays Optimization

    Provided guidance and recommendations for frontend optimization of the Teletext Holidays website

    Keywords: Frontend, Web, Optimization,
    Technologies: JavaScript, Web,
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  Support Engineer, Supporttree
  

  2010-01 — 2012-02

  Full support for small businesses including end user systems, on-premise servers and cloud services.

  • Worked in a user facing role, for a variety of small businesses
  • Made use of automation and unix, in an otherwise manual windows environment

  
  

  Providing 1st to 3rd line support of Desktops (Windows and OS X) for small businesses. In addition to end-user support, also implemented several projects & pushed for automation whenever possible.