Profile

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.

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.

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.

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.