Welcome to my Blog

Most of the information here is an aid memoir of what I’ve been doing. It’s not written for the public, but I’m all about sharing.

Please feel free to add any comments or corrections. (No spam, please, Akismet installed). Any questions will get answered; eventually, I have a full-time job(s) and family, so answering questions is very low on my list of priorities.

With the arrival of my daughter, I no longer have as much time to spend documenting things here, but it’s probably worth taking a look from time to time.

About Me

I’m a self-employed Technology Enthusiast who enjoys Cinema, the occasional Good Wine, regular Good Coffee, and some Photography, Driving, Chess Study & even some blogging (time permitting).

I’m a Cloud Evangelist, IT Director/Manager, Consultant & Solutions Architect. I love technology and have excellent high-level knowledge of all the latest Virtualisation & DevOps technologies and methodologies.

I enjoy leading/managing teams to complete projects and BAU work whilst always looking at whether there is a better/faster/cheaper way of achieving the same goals.

Fascinated with Cloud, Virtualisation & Docker, I like tinkering with old broken Synology NASs, which I repair in any “spare” time when I have the resources.

Operations Management

“No job is so simple that it cannot be done wrong” – Chinese fortune cookie.

Having worked with many companies whilst consulting and contracting, I’m ideally placed to know what works and what doesn’t in many different environments.

There is no one size fits all, but there are good frameworks that you can pick and choose the right components from.

Doing something inefficiently once or twice is not a big problem, but continuously delivering something inefficiently, even small mistakes, add up to be very wasteful and can result in defective products, which can affect your reputation and profitability.

DevOps

Infrastructure as code is one of the latest catchphrases as we move into *aaS (Everything as a Service).

Working with start-ups and post start-ups companies, I’ve been able to use my “start-up knowledge” to help enterprises become agiler and to help start-ups become more mature in their thinking and deal with issues and problems before they are realised by taking the best practice that works.

Open Source

I especially like Unix/Linux and open-source solutions.

I like that money stops being the barrier to solutions for those who take the time to learn.

I have no issue charging those who don’t want to learn for technologies I develop that let them do things they need to do.

That’s what business is all about.

*aaS

Now with Cloud, in the form of SaaS (software as a service), we are getting the same affordability model we had for a while in IaaS (infrastructure as a service).

I no longer have to purchase Photoshop & Lightroom for nearly £1000 every few years. Instead, I can pay approximately £10 monthly to access the latest versions.

I can do the same with my hardware with infrastructure as a service (IaaS), purchasing the minimum cloud resources necessary and scaling them up when their leanness holds them back.

I don’t mind paying for a product of sufficient quality if it saves me time, money or effort.

Since I have been making the transition from Ops into DevOps, I’ve subscribed to PLURALSIGHT‘s phenomenal training for $30/month.