Hi!

After initially studying Motorsport Engineering and Design followed by Computer Systems and Networks, I eventually stumbled into and settled in the broadcast industry. With large video files, real-time requirements, and 24/7 365 uptimes, the broadcast industry provided the challenge I was looking for. As broadcast has adopted an ever-increasing number of technologies from the web and high-performance computing industries, my interests have more recently focused towards the cloud. My current focus and area of expertise is AWS' highly scalable managed services, specifically serverless.

Work

Having worked in the broadcast industry since my university days, I've seen some significant transformations. Following holiday work at Quantel, I began my career supporting compliance and promo production facilities for Virgin Media, working for Red Bee Media. Here I provided engineering and end-user support for a Quantel non-linear editing system and bespoke Ardendo MAM.

After moving to Pharos / Evertz in 2010, I went on to work in various roles from Project Engineer through to my current role as Technical Director for Evertz.io. Over the years I've worked in project delivery, on bespoke customer system design and deliverables, on in-house tooling and process development, and on scalable clustered system architecture and design. I currently lead a growing team of engineers in designing, architecting, and building the companies first software as a service product, Evertz.io. Prior to this, I led a small team in a transformation to enable the deployment of our Playout and MAM products to the cloud. This culminated in the public announcement of Discovery's move to AWS, utilizing Evertz' technologies, with this industry-first garnering coverage by the Wall Street Journal.

The sections below attempt to highlight some of the technologies and tools that I've worked with and have an interest in.

AWS

Extensive production experience with Cloud Formation, Lambda, DynamoDB, Cloudwatch, SNS, SQS, Kinesis Firehose, EC2, VPC, etc.

I’m very much a convert to AWS' Serverless and Managed Services, having seen first hand the incredible rate of development and scalability that can be achieved. When used as part of a carefully architected solution they can be incredibly cost effective compared to traditional EC2 based infrastructure and its associated VPCs.

I've been AWS Certified for the last three and a half years, and maintained a Professional level certification for nearly two. I’m currently working to formalise my recent experiences via the DevOps Professional Certification.

Highly Available and Scalable Distributed Systems

For the best part of a decade I've been responsible for the design and architecture of highly scalable and fault tolerant broadcast systems; used by some of the world’s largest broadcasters.

Production knowledge of configuration and operation of ElasticSearch, Apache Mesos, RabbitMQ, MySQL & MariaDB Galera Cluster, and most recently the AWS suite of services.

An active interest in technologies such as Kubernetes, Hashicorp Vault & Consul

Broadcast

File-based workflows, video editing systems (Quantel, Avid, Davinci Resolve, FCP, FCPX), non-linear delivery, promo creation workflows, OTT, FFmpeg, MediaInfo.

Python

Numerous production deployments of Python 2 & 3, with extensive experience with packages such as Boto3, Pytest, Pipenv, pyenv, and Requests. Most recently used within AWS Lambda environments.

Configuration Management

Creation of extensive ground-up system configurations with Multi-Master SaltStack. Conducted evaluations of Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.

Linux & Networking

Over a decade of experience with production deployments of Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSuSE, and SLES.

Design and implementation of traditional on premise Layer2&3 networks, Cloud Formation defined AWS VPC & Direct Connect infrastructure, and experimental software defined networks based on OpenFlow and proprietary stacks.

Play

Home Automation

Home automation has become rather a passion of mine:

using presence detection, weather forecasts, and an array of environmental sensors; I've barely touched a light switch since moving in.

Coffee

I've recently started accruing SCA learner points towards a formal Specialty Coffee Association Certification.

Coffee has been a long time passion of mine, but more recently it has intersected with my interest in data analysis.

Rivet Racing Westfield

A fire breathing, rolling road igniting, exhaust probe melting, Mazda RX8 engined Westfield. Custom built, fabricated, and mapped by a bunch of blokes in sheds. Well, a garage.

And no one was more surprised than us that we won our class in our first season of the ACSMC 2016 Sprint Series.

Travel

I've always been keen to explore new places; sampling the local cuisine and experiencing new cultures. With a long-standing passion for food and cooking, travelling is a great opportunity to taste the flavours and learn the recipes of the world.

Photography

Photography is one of my creative outlets, most frequently featuring cars or scenes of abandonment and decay.

Complementing my interest in exploration of things hidden just out of sight, such as the Hidden London Tours

A Nasa inspired circadian lighting system

In space without the influences of an earth-like day/night cycle, the body’s circadian rhythm can become disrupted. As part of some personal sleep experiments I thought I would try and build my own.

A Raspberry Pi based RGB LED Clock

A clock that a friend and I created from a Raspberry Pi model A, 12 LPD6803 RGB leds, and a bit of spare time.

Get In Touch

If you want to debate the pros and cons of using DynamoDB Streams and event based architectural patterns, discuss some wacky idea for home automation, or offer me my dream job, please get in touch.