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BSc Hons Computer Science, University of Warwick
I graduated as a Computer Science student in 1996 with a BSc Hons degree from the University of Warwick.
I started working as a C programmer in London and realised I did not have enough time and patience to develop into a competent programmer so moved onto work at the Science Photo Library as a Systems Manager. My real skills and interests was shifting towards Unix Systems administration. Having started studying and working on Sun Microsystems Sparc workstations, I moved onto compiling C programs on SunOS 4.x servers, and started systems administration on a DEC Alpha server running Digitial Unix 4.0 OS, an image (metadata) database, an image library, connected to a multitude of line and laser printers.
After 3 years of working and living in London, I took a “gap” year to travel around the world – with a backpack and a travel partner – we successfully traversed the globe, covering 12 countries in 12 months.
Unix Systems Specialist, University of St Andrews
Returning home, I continued my career by attaining employment with the University of St Andrews in Scotland as a Unix Systems Programmer.
I spent 13 years at St Andrews and during that time my work evolved into three progressive roles: Systems Programmer, Systems Administrator and Systems Specialist. Working in IT Services, not only allowed me to advance my skills and gain experience in running Unix systems to provide the platform for databases and related services, but also allowed me to gain knowledge of networking, software development, and service provisioning and systems maintenance.
Working in IT Services at the University of St Andrews, I developed my skills and experience not only in the IT field, but also recognised the importance of work/life balance, career and self development, and the often understated role that workplace culture, politics, and unconscious biases can play in personal and professional development.
This role encouraged me to take ownership of my growth, pursue new challenges, and build confidence in both my technical abilities and interpersonal skills. I expanded my skills and knowledge from just Unix systems to Linux (Debian/Red Hat), Storage (Sun NAS/NetApp) and Virtual systems (VMWare).
Unix/Linux Technical Lead, University of Bristol
In 2014, I relocated from Scotland to Bristol, as I attained a role at the University of Bristol in IT Services as a Unix/Linux Technical Lead. This role allowed me to get involved with architecture, infrastructure, virtualisation, operating systems and platforms that had any relation with/to Linux or Unix.
The role started off with maintaining Sun Solaris M5000s systems and led to providing VM platforms (Hyper-V, Oracle Linux VM, VMWare) and other services on Dell PowerEdge servers for IT service teams, researchers and academics to run services needed for their academic work, research and teaching.
This role allowed me to gain skills and knowledge of Configuration Management – starting from BCFG2 to Puppet/Ansible/Chef and together with the problem of provisioning and managing hundreds of VMs, afforded me to gain security and management knowledge and techniques for orchestration after solidifying my experience and skills, with hypervisors, Docker, Vagrant, and Git/GitLab and other modern tools used for cloud operations.
Towards the end of my work with IT Services, I went on training Microsoft training course where I learned Azure, after IT Service started introduced the use of Azure cloud services in the Systerms Development team and the University of Bristol academic departments started using the Microsoft cloud.
During the expansion of my skills, there was also a “mind-set” change in terms of working methods and practices – I read and understood “The Phoenix Project” and was introduced into Kanban, DevOps techniques, and Agile working. The change in this working “mind-set” helped my personal development too, and after three years at the University of Bristol, I was confident that I had the skills and and knowledge to move on and succeed as a DevOps Engineer.
DevOps Engineer, start-up ISP
In 2018, I joined Truespeed Communications, a start-up internet service provider based just outside Bristol at the time. While I was initially drawn to the potential of contributing to a growing company, it soon became evident that the company was facing significant internal challenges, including a lack of cohesive leadership, high staff turnover, and ongoing tensions between employees and senior management—particularly with the Chief Technology Officer.
Despite the challenges posed by an unstable working environment—marked by office relocations and high internal tensions—I was able to make the most of my time at Truespeed by gaining hands-on experience in several key areas. I developed a strong appreciation for agile methodologies, particularly the use of stand-ups and sprints to drive team tasks and project progress. Technically, I deepened my expertise in networking, including configuring routers and telecoms equipment, and advanced my skills in automation through Ansible, Git, and Python. I also worked extensively with monitoring tools such as Icinga2 and Grafana, enhancing my ability to proactively manage infrastructure.
While the organisational culture ultimately did not align with my long-term goals, the experience provided me with valuable skills and experience growth and a clearer understanding of the kind of the tools and technologies I would like to work with. One of the main methodologies I went away with is the Test-Driven Architecture – that services, like software, can be designed and implimented using a test-driven approach using testing and monitoring tool used in the field of Observability…
Advanced Computing Research Centre, Bristol
After dipping my feet into the DevOps water and got nibbled at I returned to the University of Bristol joining their Advanced Computing Research Centre (ACRC) as a senior storage systems administrator.
I started to apply DevOps principles and solidify practices there as it was a very progressive and stable working environment where I could continue to learn and experiment with agile processes, use and implement DevOps methods and tools, with the full support of management and the director of ACRC.
Not only did I learn about storage technology and gain skills and experience another fundamental area of IT, I was able to gain much knowledge and a little experience with High Performance Computing (HPC) especially their move into the cloud and adoption of cloud services.
Oracle Global Services, Bristol – remote
After the COVID-19 pandemic hit and after several years of working with agile DevOps and Cloud methodologies and technologies, I was ready to move on to expand my learning and experience working fully remote with a US global cloud corporation.
I joined Oracle as an Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), working under a US manager to supply support for the UK Gov who use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) utilising their FIPS security compliance standards suitable for Government systems and services.
The set-up of this split US/UK PISP ONSR team did not work out in the end, but during my time there, I was able to attain all the major OCI certifications and gained experience with the ‘follow-the-sun’ method of proving 24/7 support of critical government systems and services.
Cisco Meraki, London – remote
With the restructure and shift of the UK PISP ONSR team to a UK operational manager, I chose to leave Oracle and join Cisco Meraki as an SRE in the Observabilty team. This was my big chance to work with a real DevOps team working in a progressive and agile way. I was also extremely interested in monitoring and testing – the chance to work with Elasticsearch and Grafana and other tools such as Kafka and Prometheus was too great to turn down. I had an Oracle internal offer of moving to the OCI Block Storage team but was not keen working at that low level and there was a lack of learning opportunity that I declined.
Working for Cisco Meraki was the greatest experience ever! I had chance and opportunity to gain real “cloud” skills working with AWS on all things Observability and more (obviously we have to provision our own infrastructure to run our Observability services on!)
Not only did I gain skills in technologies such as Terraform/terragrunt, Docker and Docker Swarm, improve skills using git and Gitlab, but I was also able to gain coding and scripting skills in Ruby (another language under my belt!) After several successful projects as a new starter in the team, I was progressing to larger projects. These were in running Grafana services in Kubernetes (MSK and local) clusters. Architecting multi-tenant Prometheus logging and data storage and monitoring metrics. We were actively migrating our data storage backend from Cortex to Grafana Mimir.
Other great technologies I came across and gained experience of were Sentry, New Relic, Cribl and Splunk. Of course no great team could operate effectively without the use of Jira, Confluence, and Trello for controlling our everyday work with sprints and stand-ups, and for long-term planning – starting, tracking and completing projects that was of value to the wider Cisco Meraki SRE team.
Unfortunately, with every great rise, there is going to be a fall, and early 2024 I was part of Cisco’s RIF (reduction in force) and was laid off. It was soul-destroying but again I learnt so many things from that period, that there was no regrets joining Cisco Meraki.
It was a tough job market at the time. I went through so many applications that I had to keep a spreadsheet of them! However, through contacts, I was referred to a role back with Oracle!
Oracle Global Services, Bristol – hybrid
More on my current role with Oracle in the OCI Object Storage team…