About

It all started with a Sinclair ZX81 in 198(mumble-something); quoting "The Mentor"

"I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second, this is cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up."

Since then, every computer, operating system and piece of software has been something to be studied, learned, understood.

I've spent a lot of time in "corporate America", that is, working in large (10,000 to 400,000 employee) American owned, global companies, which has allowed me to do big things with big computers (and lots of them).  When you have millions of people depending on you to make the thing work, every-single-time, you learn to do it "right".  

Thanks to incredible pioneers that started the Open Source Software (OSS) revolution, there's a world of software that most people don't understand is there for them to use, free of financial charge.  When you lean into how OSS works (I highly recommend reading Rebel Code), you start to see that the great free to use software is just the beginning; how you bolt it together is when you build things that make a difference for individuals and companies.

Every time I build a new project, system or service, I'm building on every previous project and that's all built upon 'the forefathers' of the internet.  Perhaps in contrast to others, I have to learn and understand the thing I'm building (there's zero Install->Next->Next->Finish in this house) so I can produce results that are stable, reliable, resilient and dependable[1].

Perhaps a controversial statement: in infrastructure operations and DevOps, boring is good.  No drama means everything has been considered, ready for failures and how to handle them.  Every day without a PagerDuty alert is a win.

This desire for 'boring is good' and 30 years of experience is what drives the "Invisible Infrastructure Framework " - how to build an environment where the end-user doesn't know it exists.

Aside from building all-things-Linux and infrastructure, I tend to be outside in the real world, off-roading when the Land Rover isn't broken and often quoting Hot Fuzz.

[1] Example: something like 15 years after I left Citi, a former colleague reached out with a question, based upon something I'd developed whilst there and was still in use.

Credits

The 'background' photo is by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash.  The 'contact' image is by Markus Winkler on Unsplash.  Both images used within the terms of the Unsplash license.