Profile

With many years experience of a wide range of cloud automation and web platforms, languages and backend systems. I have a broad knowledge of technologies suited to web, virtualisation and cloud architecture design. Originally a full stack web developer, for the last 7 years I have developed infrastructure as code as a senior cloud engineer. First for Oracle's cloud infrastructure (OCI) team with Python and Ruby, followed by 3 years of Golang and K8s developing and supporting Forgerock’s new Identity Cloud platform on GCP as a Staff SRE. I am now a Senior Golang developer at EDB, working remotely in Bristol, UK. I work on EDB's cloud marketplace product Postgres AI.

Work Experience

2022-present EDB, Senior Staff Software Engineer

EDB is the Postgres company. I develop Golang gRPC micro-services on K8s providing the identity management and billing components of EDB's multi-cloud Marketplace product, Postgres AI. Along with some data pipeline, Airflow, Python work. All as part of EDB's Postgres multi-cloud data lakehouse solution available across Azure, GCP and AWS.

2019-2022 Forgerock, Senior Staff SRE

Developing the ID Cloud - providing secure access for many major companies, banks and the public sector. Mainly Golang Kubernetes work. Projects include, an E2E testing K8s operator, customer config promotion tool, Codefresh CI/CD optimisation. Argo workflows controlled orchestration engine to enable different upgrade models for hundreds of customer clusters. Terraform modules for PostgreSQL cloud sql deployment. Along with Scala performance testing and some Vue JS front end work. The role includes oncall weeks and ops kanban work which helps inform the main automation development sprints.

2016-2019 Oracle, Principal Software Engineer

Engineer in the Oracle Cloud SRE toolchain development team I moved on to the network automation development team. Working in a multinational team to develop and maintain a global cloud infrastructure. Experience of automation and telemetry systems development at both the network and compute node level. Developed software that uses SDN approaches to roll out leaf and spine topology data centers across the world. Worked on network observability tools.

2014-2016 University of Bristol, ITS Senior Developer

Senior developer - Development of integration infrastructure, identity management, student and finance systems in Java Spring and Oracle. Support of legacy and third party institutional system integration.

2000-2014 University of Bristol, ILRT Senior Researcher

Senior web developer / technical lead in the R&D unit (ILRT) – a team funded by external commercial work and research, that also developed and delivered University services such as its CMS and national academic services, the BOS survey tool. My role was to research, select and develop novel technical solutions for the provision of University and external services and web applications. To feed new software architectures into the repertoire of tools available within the University’s IT infrastructure. To provide technical consultancy and system analysis and service management skills.

I initiated our automated application build and deployment (Jenkins, Fabric, virtualenv) for our inhouse virtualisation architecture. Along with database integration tools for our CMS and web frameworks.

I did some Javascript front end web development. I am well versed in Internet protocols, security and standards, and have pioneered cloud and Enterprise scale integration solutions.

I acted as our division's DBA – PostgreSQL, Oracle and MySQL along with NoSQL Object DBs, Cassandra and RDF triple stores. 

My work demanded a range of skills. Consultancy and translating clients' requirements to system analysis, through technical specification and agile practice. Test driven development, release management, user-centered design and usability were all part of the job, as were project management, junior developer management and client handling skills. 

Education & Skills

20 years of development, software architecture, project specification and management.

Languages: Golang, Python, Java, Ruby, Scala, SQL, Javascript, PHP, Perl, VB

Databases: PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, SQLServer, Cassandra, BigTable, ZODB, RDF stores

Config and Cloud: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Flux, ArgoCD, Chef, Ansible, Kafka, Zookeeper

Markup: HTML, XML, RDF, SOAP, JSON, SVG, SAML2, YAML

Open source, talks and publications

During the course of my career, I decided to spend some free time packaging and releasing a number of open source packages - small components derived from code required for the day job, for example django-csvimport and its Golang cousin, gormcsv. I find the process of making code into distinct documented generic releasable components, which attract external contributors, highly beneficial for code quality.

I am a member of some local software user groups, and have co-run the Python one for the last few years. I speak regularly at techie meetups and at conferences.

• Regular talks at the Bristol (and Cardiff) Python user groups  - DBBUG / PythonDjangoCardiff

• Other talks at Europython, DjangoCon and Google Europe User Group.

Over the years I have produced a few research papers and consultancy reports.

Education

Bangor University - Electronics B.Sc.

University of Bristol - Physics of Semiconductor Materials M.Sc. 

University of the West of England - P.G.C.E. in Higher Ed teaching

Interests

Although I have a diverse educational background, it does have a common thread. Personally, both in terms of hobbies and work, I get my greatest rewards from creating things. I still pursue my interests in fine art drawing, painting and pottery - cooking and wine making are also hobbies.