Senior Software and Systems Architect/Engineer with a wide
range of experience. Excellent interpersonal/group communication
and teamwork skills. Highly self-motivated, with first-class
analytical, design and problem-solving skills. Particular passion
for design, building and application of automation tools and
methodologies which rapidly accelerate processes and optimize
environments whilst maintaining strict quality standards.
| January 2012 to date |
Worked on SUSE
Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, including
new Booth
Ticket Manager for multi-site clustering. Helped design
and implement new SUSE
Cloud product based on OpenStack and Dell
Crowbar.
|
| June 2012 to December 2012 |
Took a sabbatical to resume musical
studies. Carried on coding on various F/OSS
projects and personal
projects during this time in order to keep skills sharp.
Became maintainer of GNU Stow.
|
| August 2009 to June 2011 |
Engineering and architecture of PlateSpin
Orchestrate, a Java- and Jython-based, HPC-enabled data
centre automation platform providing the core orchestration
backend component of Novell
Cloud Manager, which manages the lifecycle of
virtual/physical assets within heterogeneous data centres.
- Remote working member of core engineering team, largely
self-trained on a huge codebase (over 4 million lines) due
to timezone differences and travel budget limitations.
- Primary owner and developer of the product's fully
automated build/test framework. Author and primary owner of
the product's automated testing strategy roadmap.
Introduced a modernized approach to unit testing of legacy
code involving TestNG, Mockito, and PowerMock.
Designed and implemented a heuristic recognition algorithm
for tracking frequencies of integration test failure
scenarios.
- Helped analyse and resolve issues during major upgrade
of the product's customized Jython engine from 2.1 to 2.5
(e.g. heap dump analysis to identify PermGen memory
leaks).
- Introduced git and
decentralized development and testing workflows to the team,
which resulted in 100% passes on the first test run after
merging the Jython 2.5 upgrade back into the trunk.
- Acts as primary contact point for third-line support of
all EMEA customers and partners, and has represented the
product at EMEA-wide and global conferences. Built a
showcase demonstrating how the product can be used in a
Green IT scenario to dynamically optimise thermal airflow
within a data centre, via automated physical relocation of
virtual workloads according to policies based on temperature
sensor data.
|
| December 2006 to July 2009 |
Operated on many strategic and SSO-oriented tactical
projects within the UK. Specialising in, but not
limited to, data-centre
topics such as virtualization,
high
availability and disaster recovery, migrations
from UNIX to SUSE Linux
Enterprise, interoperability
and heterogeneous systems management, policy-based automation
and the dynamic ("adaptive") data-centre, and SUSE
Linux Enterprise Real Time (SLERT) and low-latency
infrastructure.
|
| November 2005 to December 2006 |
Sole UK architect of LST, operating on many
strategic and SSO-oriented tactical projects within the UK
and across EMEA.
- Active in many major named UK accounts, particularly in the
financial and telco verticals. Have engaged directly
to help large clients relate to Novell's data-centre
vision and existing product range, handling
introductions to new technology, specific technical
objections, business process issues etc.
- Close technical collaboration with other LST
architects on SLES, SLED, Xen, NLPOS, HASF, SLERT etc.
- Provided support on deep technical issues, PoCs,
benchmarks etc. to area/geo Technical Specialists and
Consultants.
- Acted as area's primary technical
interface/escalation point into R&D and PBU for Linux and F/OSS
issues, both internally and for clients/partners.
- Supported Client Executives/Managers in their
understanding of many topics, e.g. specific
technologies/products, the F/OSS community,
patent/license issues, GTM models, industry
trends/sweet-spots, partnering processes, etc.
- Participated in key marketing events,
e.g. LinuxWorld, SLE10 launch, Gartner conferences.
- Technical collaboration with and training of key
IHV/ISV partners.
- Primary EMEA technical contact for SUSE Linux
Enterprise Real Time.
|
| September 2002 to November 2005 |
Originally recruited as primary EMEA Linux specialist to
a team responsible for engineering, deploying, and
maintaining builds of Linux on x86 hardware (including Egenera BladeFrames) for
use with mission-critical, highly-available production
applications stacks migrated from Solaris/SPARC.
Subsequently merged with UNIX team, and later chosen as
founder member of European Infrastructure and Architecture
Engineering team.
- Primary EMEA representative of tightly-knit virtual
team responsible for global Linux builds.
- Designed, implemented, and maintained sophisticated
OO engine and toolset for parallelized
scheduling/execution of arbitrary jobs (including
components for Kerberos-/ssh-based remote
distribution).
- Designed, implemented, and maintained a host-grouping
database, facilitating automated administration of
large machine clusters defined by flexible rules
based on Boolean set logic.
- Designed, implemented and maintained a complete,
centrally administered, policy-based rpm distribution
system, which successfully controlled synchronisation
of all software installed (from OS-level to
application-level), and additionally controlled all
site-specific configuration. Coupled with
PXE/DHCP/KickStart booting technology, allowing any
system to be completely rebuilt to its previous state
within minutes, much faster than any restore from
backup tape.
- Took part in a long-term project reviewing
architecture of all tier 1 European applications
specifically with regards to high availability and
disaster recovery. Played a key part in designing
and implementing automated server-based test suite to
improve review turn-over.
- Heavy involvement with engineering of roll-out of Opsware and
related custom tools/infrastructure for
workflow-based deployment and configuration of custom
in-house applications.
- Built several task automation and verification tools
including shell-based domain language facilitating
configuration management and test suites.
- Worked closely with vendors on many issues at the
hardware, application, system, and kernel levels.
- Assisted with a cost-cutting server consolidation project.
- Lead engineer on team responsible for certifying,
supporting and maintaining highly customised
firm-wide production builds of Perl (including
several hundred CPAN modules).
- Worked with storage management team on enablement of
SAN/NAS connectivity from Linux machines to EMC/Network Appliance
systems, from cabling/driver configuration to
volume manager software etc.
- Established intranet web-based solution for issue
tracking, knowledge base building, and
process/procedure documentation. Provided full suite
of procedures to SA teams relating to Linux
builds and support thereof.
- Provided support to developers involved in porting
applications from Solaris.
|
| 1995 to date |
- Was allocated stock in both Red Hat and VA Linux prior to their
IPOs in recognition of significant contributions to
Linux community. Only a few hundred engineers
world-wide were hand-selected for each of these.
- Acknowledged in credits for majority of
Linux and Perl installations in the world.
- Have discovered and helped fix many system-level bugs in
various Linux distributions and
software.
- Have run Linux constantly at home since early days
of Slackware 2, Red Hat 3.0.3, and 1.2.x kernels.
- Long-distance collaboration on shared code bases via
git, svn, CVS etc., and online
discussion forums. Experienced in lucid written
communication on complex technical issues via e-mail and
newsgroups.
|
| 1999 to September 2002 |
guideguide (formerly known as
mediaconsult) develops customer-driven
"e-publishing" websites for high-profile partners in
specific sectors of German market. Technologies used
included traditional LAMP stack, XML, Java, NAS.
- Performed and supervised design, implementation and
maintenance of many complex
object-oriented (OO) class
hierarchies within a large code base
(~275,000 lines).
-
Promoted use of eXtreme
Programming (XP) methodologies, e.g.:
- Established code quality guidelines and review
process.
- Developed comprehensive test suite in
conjunction with PerlUnit
testing framework.
- Performed extensive refactoring of problematic
legacy code.
- Created/maintained several CPAN
modules in conjunction with project.
- Built several automation tools to increase
efficiency of development (e.g. automatic
configuration of complex in-house Apache/mod_perl
setups, tools for code integration, mysqldiff).
- Ensured increased reliability of production servers
via automated online testing.
- Administered and optimized MySQL databases
(~40,000 users).
- Administered bugzilla
bug-tracking database, and integrated it with existing
source control systems.
- Compiled, installed and supported many development
tools.
- Built and administered powerful subsystem for
dynamic image generation to improve customer-based
customizability.
- Set up a shared documentation system on the
intranet.
|
| 1999 |
W3 WebSolutions Ltd. designed, implemented and hosted
dynamic websites for clients with a wide range of
required applications.
- Replaced problematic old servers with completely new
Red Hat Linux systems.
- Installed, configured and maintained services
including MySQL, Apache with PHP and SSL extensions, wu-ftpd, sendmail, and bind DNS
server.
- Built CGI interfaces
in Perl for DNS and sendmail virtual domain
configuration, giving customers control of their own
domains.
|
| 1996 to 1998 |
Was offered this post as a result of the college's
recognition of the substantial improvement to the quality
of their IT facilities through my voluntary work during
the last two years of my degree
there. Achievements/responsibilities included:
- Administration of UNIX (in particular Linux)
systems, the college's web server and website, and
services for scientific-oriented students: sshd, sendmail, qmail, IMAP, POP3 and FTP
daemons, Apache,
MySQL etc.
- Installation and maintenance of a UNIX-based
request tracking database to keep on top of all the
technical support requests received from students and
administrative staff.
- Supervision of and participation in installation of
college-wide Cat 5 ethernet cabling, including
router/switch/firewall configuration.
- IT budget responsibility.
- Complete installation and management of a Novell Netware network for
~700 users integrated with Windows and Mac
clients.
- University-wide collaboration with other
departmental and collegiate IT professionals to improve
the university's IT infrastructure.
|
| Summer 1996 |
The Mayo Clinic is the largest private health clinic
in the world.
- Enabled fast, site-wide access to various nuclear
medicine imaging techniques and static content via the
clinic's intranet.
|
Available on request.