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 and conferences, including LeedsPHP, BarCamp Barnsley and The Digital Barn.
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 at SkyBet in February 2011 as a software engineer. I worked in an Agile team on SkyBet's LAMP-based SSO system that now powers Sky Bet, Sky Vegas, Sky Sports' Fantasy Football and Challenge.co.uk.
In August 2011 I was lucky enough to become SkyBet's first DevOps engineer. I've been working on trend monitoring with Graphite, automation with Chef and helping our developers to improve 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.