Curriculum Vitae

Skills

Overview:

• Perl developer with over a decade of software engineering and development experience across the entire software lifecycle. Substantial LAMP stack experience.
• Strong Unix/Linux system and network administration skills.
• Experience of large scale data warehousing and high-volume, high-availability Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enviroments.
• Application security penetration testing experience.
• Keen to share knowledge with - and learn from - colleagues and mentor junior team members.

Development:

• Perl: including OO techniques and many CPAN modules/frameworks, including Dancer, Mason, Template Toolkit, Class::Accessor and DBI.
• Other programming: Unix shell. Basic working knowledge of C.
• Web technologies: REST, AJAX, HTML/XML, CSS.
• Databases, data warehousing: MySQL and Oracle, ANSI SQL, SAS, Trillium.
• Message queuing systems: beanstalkd, RabbitMQ.
• Source control: git, Subversion, CVS.

Systems administration:

• Provisioning: Redhat kickstart, cobbler and RPM. BSD ports.
• Configuration management: Puppet.
• Monitoring: SNMPd, Nagios, Cacti.
• Apache and Squid configuration.
• MySQL database setup & administration.
• Networking: Cisco IOS & HP ProCurve configuration. OpenBSD pf & Linux iptables.
• Email: postfix, dovecot, sendmail and qmail configuration. Knowledge of SMTP etc.
• Virtualisation: VMware ESX admin, some KVM, Xen & Amazon EC2 experience.
• Others: OpenSSH, OpenLDAP, ISC BIND and DHCPd, NTPd, many more.

Work Experience

Details to follow.

Architected and implemented a system to receive, process and archive network security device rulesets and offer data to other distributed systems via a RESTful interface. Used OO Perl, Dancer micro web framework, Beanstalk message queue, Oracle.

Introduced Puppet configuration management, standardised server builds using Cobbler and Redhat kickstart. Brought server provisioning times down from days to minutes. Drove efforts to introduce controlled development and test environments.

Worked with Group IT to provide additional Unix systems administration resource, provisioning systems and deploying code when required.

Carried out software maintenance and development tasks, primarily using Perl, MySQL, shell.
Mentored junior technical staff and carried out peer reviews with more experienced engineers.

Performed application penetration testing, using a combination of manual and automated test methods before providing recommendations to help clients improve application security.

Singlehandedly introduced then maintained automated standardised, repeatable server provisioning (CentOS, cobbler, kickstart, yum) and configuration management using Puppet.
This provided the foundation for the company's subsequent use of Amazon EC2; eased hardware and OS upgrades and simplified maintenance; lastly, this promoted the uptake of developer and test environments, which I had championed.

Developed and maintained the company's MailControl managed e-mail security service, working on the LAMP platform using Perl with Mason.

Designed and implemented software to allow the automated enrolment of new customers, including functionality manage customer assignment to MailControl clusters. This work has significantly reduced the workload of Customer Services and Operations.

Implemented changes to the licensing and accounting subsystem of the company's portal, including facilities to automatically control the customer's enabled services, removing the need for Customer Services to manage the process.

Worked as technical lead and was involved with interviewing and mentoring new technical staff.

Formed part of the operations on-call rota, supported the entire infrastructure out of hours.
Defined the process to build system and integration test environments, allowing developers to build consistent environments representative of production.

Worked on the company's multi-terabyte data warehouse, maintaining ETL code and specialising in data cleansing and customer matching applications using Perl, Trillium, SAS and Oracle.

Re-architected and refactored a batch process to cleanse Centrica's multi-billion row customer database and merge updated Post Office address information. My new system corrected all known issues with the previous system and could be run unattended within a weekend, whereas the previous system took up to a fortnight and required considerable manual intervention.

Enhanced a mission critical matching application to consistently execute in minutes rather than days, adding system capacity and reducing hardware costs by a quarter of a million pounds.

Managed weekly released to the production environment, and introduced the CVS source control system to manage the department's code repository.

Led a group of helpdesk analysts supporting several thousand users by telephone.

Acted as a system administrator for the company's proprietary inventory database on Unix.

Education

1997 - 1999. Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, Midlothian
Studied for two years towards a BEng (Hons) Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

1996 - 1997. Cricklade College, Andover, Hampshire
Achieved A-levels in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, all grade D.

1993 - 1994. The Clere School, Burghclere, Berkshire
Awarded nine GCSEs including Science (double award) at grade BB, English and Mathematics at grade C.

Hobbies and Other Activities

I like to spend some of my free time experimenting with different technologies and tools.
I used to play rugby, although these days I'm more likely to be found watching games in the stands or the pub with friends.
I enjoy attending gigs, listening to music of various genres, particularly progressive rock and metal.
I'm a keen amateur photographer, preferring street and landscape photography.