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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 decomissioning datacentres and moving high availability SaaS platforms into the cloud. As a result I've gained quite a lot of experience in a wide range of systems, from networking, high availability proxies, CDNs, databases, monitoring tools, load balancers, deployment and IaC systems such as github actions, teamcity, terraform, 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'm currently working for a relatively small company running a relatively large SaaS platform serving multiple petabytes of data globally on a hybrid multi-cloud platform.

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 walking and the occasional Parkrun

Contact

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