Profile
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Chris Neale
Curriculum Vitae
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Education:
Aston University Birmingham
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Qualifications:
11 GCSEs, 4 A Levels, B.Eng in Electronic Engineering & Computer Science
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Work History:
Infor, CSC, DXC
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Current Job:
Cloud Engineer/Architect
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Employer:
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About Me
42 year old Mancunian wondering what the world is doing to itself!
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I live just outside Manchester, close enough to the Trafford Centre to ride my bike to….but I don’t. I grew up here, went to university in Aston, Birmingham for 10 years then came back! I’m married with 2 kids, play the piano when I’m not tired or bingeing something from Netflix.
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My Work
Cloud Engineer
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I started in IT when I was at Uni doing desktop support. That morphed into leading the IT department and going to other offices in Atlanta in the US, Milan, Paris and Amsterdam around Europe to set up remote connections to those offices.
I like fixing stuff or solving problems. Problems might not be something’s broken, but getting two things talking to each other. I worked as a Support Engineer for a large IT services company who has customers like British AeroSpace, The NHS, National Rail, Rolls Royce. The technology and trends were the start of Cloud. Squishing many “virtual” servers on to one computer, doing more for less.
Now I design and build Cloud solutions for our customers in the Public cloud.
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My Typical Day: Figuring out how to make 2 things talk, create things faster, or getting a computer to do it for me!
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I write code that creates servers and networks and databases and websites and places to store files in the cloud, to help customers solve a particular problem.
Once I’ve figured out what the solution is I try and automate the steps so that someone else (ideally a computer) can do it for me instead.
Our customers might sell a thing or build a plane, but they all have similar needs in that they want to get as much information about either their customers or how long each bit of building a plane takes, so we help them collect lots and lots of data and put it in a big area where it can be looked at (again by a computer algorithm) to spot trends, either in who buys what, or which bit of building a plane takes longest.
Information is power. By letting our customers know who buys what they can advertise or discount to them. If they find what part of plane building is slowing them down, they can try and improve it or fix it faster.
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What I'd do with the money
Expand our Internet of Things lab that we use for STEM demos
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We have an Internet of Things (IoT) lab which we use to demo to teachers and students who visit, in a shrunken version…like lego mindstorms but , of what we do with customers on things like production lines for detecting faults in systems and feeding that information back.
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Curious, determined, tired.
What's the best thing you've done in your career?
Deploy a secure WiFI system to 14,000 users
What or who inspired you to follow your career?
Seeing that computers let you do anything you can imagine.
What was your favourite subject at school?
IT
What did you want to be after you left school?
Computer Programmer
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Only once, for making someone else laugh!
If you weren't doing this job, what would you choose instead?
A translator
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Stereolab
What's your favourite food?
Chinese
What is the most fun thing you've done?
Learning to sail the week before going to Ibiza
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
Road trip across Canada, Get better sleep, have no mortgage
Tell us a joke.
Picked up a hitchhiker last night. He said "thanks, how do you know I'm not a killer?". I said "the chances of two serial killers
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