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About Me

Career

I've been working in the tech industry for nearly 25 years. My first IT job was as a Junior Sysadmin, at a software house in London, and mainly involved desktop support (mostly Wyse serial terminals to start with!). We also had a stack of Unix servers running HP-UX, Sco, Alpha, AIX and others, into which I threw Linux as well, as a file/print/email/intranet server. I even got involved with Windows server admin

Prior to actual paid work, I almost failed my degree because I was more interested in learning about how the campus Sun network worked and how to bludgeon my Linux desktop onto it - with much messing about with PPP over parallel, web services and so on. I only had a small number of warning messages from the campus systems people...

Since then, I've worked for a number of software and tech businesses, and seem to have carved out a career in decommissioning datacentres and moving high availability SaaS platforms into the cloud using automation tools such as Terraform, GitHub Actions and others. As a result I've gained quite a lot of experience in a wide range of cloud and on-prem systems, from networking, storage services, high availability proxies, CDNs, databases, monitoring tools, load balancers, deployment and IaC tools, as well as the usual Linux sysadmin kinds of things. I still enjoy working with physical infrastructure, though these days I mostly look after applications in the cloud. I have also done some dev work, most recently with the music ingestion team to sanitise and process incoming audio and artwork media from music distributors.

I have just left a music streaming company and am currently on the lookout for a new opportunity, either contract or full time. Contact details below.

This site

This site came about while tidying up some old memory sticks - where I found a stash of useful tips that I collected whilst contracting. Rather than have them languish in a drawer I figured I'd get them in the public domain where I'd at least be able to find them! I've since found other collections of tips - some on actual paper! - which will make it into the online collection.

The site is a simple php framework that pulls in MarkDown pages from a folder tree. The files are held in git and deployed periodically into the live site. I did try to find a CMS that would do what I need but mostly they are all way too heavy - though I'm very aware that I have accidentally written yet another CMS.

Hobbies

When not working or child-wrangling, I like to be able to play outdoors - cycling, winter sports and flying kites (like, big ones) , as well as running and volunteering at the occasional Parkrun

Contact

If you want to get in touch, especially if you have a physical datacentre you want wrestling into shape, you can get hold of me on glorioushacks (at) gromatic (dot) uk or through LinkedIn