I am a geek from Bradford, UK. I currently work for SkyBet in Leeds as a DevOps Engineer. I occasionally post snippets of code and relative wisdom to my blog. I have a few GitHub repos too.
To put it bluntly: computers; especially solving problems with computers. I write
quite a lot of PHP and, more recently, JavaScript (using Node.js
as it happens), but I enjoy getting my hands on everything from routers and switches
to real-time graphing software.
When I'm not tinkering with computers, I'm usually destroying making
something in my garage or sampling the local cuisine.
I have recently started speaking at a few local group meetings, including LeedsPHP and BarCamp Barnsley. In February 2012 I will be speaking at The Digital Barn on writing testable PHP.
I have no problem learning new stuff, but there are some things I know quite well already.
I've spent a lot of time working with PHP; it's been my go-to language for many years. I've written ticket trackers, shell scripts and even a basic webserver in it. It gets a lot of bad press, but I've never really had a problem avoiding what most people consider the bad bits.
My current job involves writing data collection daemons for Graphite using Node.js. It is a surprising amount of fun and has helped me to realise that I never really hated JavaScript, I just hate the DOM. JavaScript is a powerful language that I have grown to love, but if you're looking for someone to write large amounts of front-end code, I'm probably not your man.
Any dev worth their salt should love their VCS, and I love mine. I used to use Subversion, which was fine; then I started using Git. I like Git so much that I've even begun to keep my dotfiles in a Git repo.
I can lift 'eavy things, me.
I hate to use such a generic heading, but it seems apt. I spend much of my day in a bash shell. Vim is my editor of choice, and there's probably an average of 4 pipes per line in my command history. Ack, sed and awk are some of my favourite things.
Clichéd as it may be, my main skill is learning things in a timely fashion. If I need to learn something to solve a problem, I will do just that.
I've not worked on as much Open Source stuff as I would like. Although I do release a lot of the code I write outside of work, it's not always that useful.
I have helped to maintain the Etherpad Lite PHP client. It's by no means a complex client, but I'm proud to be a part of the project.
I have decided to miss out the part where I worked for a paintball centre while I was at school. It was fun, but it taught me very little about computers.
I started here in February 2011 as a software engineer. I worked in an Agile team on SkyBet's LAMP-based SSO system that now powers Sky Sports' Fantasy Football, Challenge.co.uk and the soon-to-be-released revamped versions of Sky Bet and Sky Vegas.
In August my role changed to that of a DevOps engineer. I've been spending my time working on trend monitoring, automation and the gradual roll-out of a revamped version of Sky Vegas.
From 2008 until 2010 I worked at Halifax-based VLE provider FrogTrade Ltd as a Web Applications Developer, and later as Software Architect. Much of my time as a developer was spent helping to iron the bugs out of FrogTrade's half-million line codebase, and adding much requested new features.
As Software Architect I designed a controller and view system for a new product and back-ported it to the existing software. I also laid the foundations for a flexible, XML-based reporting system.
I originally started at Primary Technology as a network engineer in 2005; maintaining Windows-based networks in Bradford primary schools. I later became the Hosted Services Director where I managed an Exchange-based hosted email system, remote access system and wrote a web-based ticket management system.
If it's informal, feel free to mention me on Twitter. If you want a bit more privacy or aren't a fan of this new-fangled social networking, just email me instead.