Background
I’m a technologist, speaker, content creator and tinkerer with an interest in machine learning, infrastructure, software design and anything that crosses the boundaries between software and hardware.
Currently working for VMware ↗ as a Dev Advocate/Tech Marketing Architect focused on running, operationalising and architecting K8s on vSphere, along-side the DevOps practices used to make it all tick in the real world.
I’ve grown up and lived in Northern Ireland all my life, but maybe that will change in the future.
I have always been into computers, building PCs for my parent’s business at £5 a go from the age of 9… it was only natural that my career move in that direction too.
My interest in infrastructure and apps began with web design before and during university, being a poor student I self-hosted all the sites I built, for better or worse. After a while it became apparent that running client websites on an old linux PC I had cobbled together at home (lovingly nicknamed Io ↗ for its instability) was …not a fantastic idea.
My introduction to infrastructure began with trying to solve that stability problem, by adding another host and discovering virtualisation and live VM migrations. At that point I was hooked and was more interested in providing a foundation on top of which to run apps, than building the apps themselves.
That has changed over time, as I gained mastery of one subject I decided that wouldn’t suffice and I could solve more problems and became more interested in the upper layers. And so, worked my way further and further up stack, from Virtualisation, to Containers, to Kubernetes, through to Knative, and more recently to Machine Learning ↗, Continuous Delivery ↗; cloud native application architecture and patterns; and building declarative services platforms.
If you want to see some of the content I create for work - check out my /works page.
Now
If you’re wondering what i’m doing, or into right now, my /now page is focused on just that, this is more of a history and long running themes.
Hobbies
I have been into electro-mechanical things forever, from cars to CNC machines, 3D printers, robotics - anything physical that is programmable really. I have a number of areas of interest that I dip into and out of over time.
Photography/Travel
I was very into photography for a number of years, culminating in a trips to Chernobyl in 2015 ↗ and Cambodia in 2016 - which you can check out here ↗ and here ↗. I’m sure i’ll revisit this again in the future.
Cars
I have a project car, an R53 Mini Cooper S JCW (at least, that’s what it used to be), just about everything you can think of has been changed, or is custom - from the suspension, to the crankshaft, heads, block, rods, pistons, to the ECU, even the gear shifter mechanism.
As with all project cars it’s never-ending, but that’s part of the fun, having it run at 8000rpm on track and think “I built that engine” is extremely rewarding. Granted - it’s not as fast as my daily driver which is covered by a warranty and doesn’t kill itself for fun, but that’s not the point, is it?
3D Printing
I’ve been into 3D printing for a number of years, since about 2014 when I built a MendelMax 3 - which was enough to put me off 3D printing until about a year ago, when I built a Prusa i3 MK3S ↗ and it was incredible.
More recently, I took what I learned with that and built a completely self-sourced printer to address the limitations I came across, the Voron v2.4 ↗. It’s an ABS-first enclosed chamber printer with a modern firmware ↗ and some really neat kinematics ↗.
Music
Music has always played a massive part in my life, in fact it’s hard to overstate it just how critical it is to me. My taste has gone through many iterations, but not to the extent where all of the previous iteration is lost or forgotten about - usually it builds and I find hybrids of genres and sounds I enjoy.
If you want to check out what i’m into now, all that is here.
Contact
The best way to get a hold of me is to send me a DM on Twitter ↗.