Summary
- Tech Lead and senior software engineer with over 30 years of experience across back-end development, operations, cloud platforms, and large-scale legacy systems. My strongest background is in Perl, which I have used extensively for high-capacity web systems, daemons, internal tooling, API endpoints, and data-heavy workflows. I also work with SQL, Cloudflare,GCP, and Terraform. I am steadily building experience with Rust for new services.
- I specialise in modernising long-lived systems, improving performance, diagnosing complex issues, and delivering pragmatic, maintainable solutions.
- Remote, UK. Open to fully remote roles with flexible working hours, where versatility is valued.
Employment
Situation Publishing
May 2017 to present (Tech Lead)
May 2017 to December 2022 (Senior Developer)
Lead engineer for the back-end systems that power The Register, a leading global online tech publication, along with internal applications and the company's CRM and lead-generation platform. The role spans back-end engineering, cloud architecture, database design, and modernising deeply embedded legacy systems.
- Maintaining and extending large-scale Perl systems across publishing infrastructure, internal tools, and daemonised services.
- Supporting a PostgreSQL-backed lead management system with Kafka logs and downstream data pipelines. Rewrote the core contact-matching logic to provide near-instant results, dramatically improving campaign workflows.
- Designing and deploying GCP services on Cloud Run, Cloud Build, IAM, VPC access, IAP, HTTPS load balancers, and PSC.
- Building modular Terraform infrastructure with secure defaults and automated deployments.
- Creating internal APIs and automation utilities, including building new components in Rust as part of incremental modernisation.
- Designing and optimising PostgreSQL and MySQL schemas and queries.
- Integrating Kafka and Debezium for replication, CDC, and event-driven pipelines.
- Diagnosing system-wide production issues, from databases to cloud services.
SpareRoom.co.uk
August 2011 to May 2017 (Technical Lead)
Technical Lead for one of the UK's busiest flat-sharing websites. Responsible for improving code quality, performance, scalability, and development processes.
- Introduced Perl coding standards, code reviews, unit testing, and structured refactoring practices.
- Migrated version control from Subversion to Git.
- Improved scalability with memcached and Gearman; upgraded legacy Perl and MySQL systems.
- Built standardised development/testing environments using VirtualBox.
- Moved advert photo storage to AWS S3 behind EC2/ELB.
- Implemented HAProxy for front-end and database load balancing.
- Automated deployments using Perl, Rex, and Pinto.
- Led migration of core search from MySQL to Sphinx Search for major performance gains.
Self Employment
August 2005 to August 2011
Freelance web development and IT support for small businesses, including building database-driven sites (Linux, Apache/nginx, MySQL, PHP, Perl), creating custom CMS platforms, and delivering bespoke data-processing utilities.
Cheshire Building Society
July 2001 to April 2003 (Technical Support Programmer)
April 2003 to August 2005 (Infrastructure & Security Analyst)
Third-level support and later infrastructure/security work, covering critical systems support, disaster recovery testing, and maintaining security and firewall systems.
Building Design Partnership
July 1996 to July 2001 (Third-Level Technical Support)
Expert Systems Design
July 1995 TO July 1996 (Developer & On-Site Support)
Atkins Odlin & Partners
April 1992 to July 1995 (Computer Administrator & AutoCAD Technician)
Technical Skills
- Languages: Perl (primary), JavaScript, SQL, Rust (novice), Bash
- Cloud: Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Run, Cloud Build, IAM, IAP, VPC, PSC, AlloyDB)
- Infrastructure: Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, automated deployments
- Data & Streaming: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache Kafka, Debezium
- Systems & Ops: Linux, Git, systemd
- Web: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Apache HTTP Server