If you are considering offering me work
Hiring people is a tricky thing, and recruitment within this industry is a very inefficient process. So, to help us both out here are some things about me you might like to know.
I’ve been a UNIX administrator/architect/analyst/infrastructure engineer for about 13 years. However, I started out a developer and have continued to write code throughout my career. I see the development of tools as key to administering systems, so much so that I am ardent supporter of “infrastructure as code” as seen within tools such as Chef from Opscode, and Puppet to a lesser extent.
My first professional development job was in S/390 assembler (which lives on in the IBM zSeries mainframes), and I’ve touched every major version of UNIX in production use at some point over my career. Today I prefer to write code and automate using Ruby and Rails, and manage infrastructure with Chef. I firmly believe that the future of infrastructure architecture and management to be development of and for RESTful web services.
Whilst I have served my time with real machines, fitted out cabinets, run Cat 5, configured VLANs and most other aspects of traditional system administration, today I prefer to focus on virtual machines in public cloud providers, primarily Amazon EC2 and supporting services.
I prefer contract roles, although will of course consider a permanent position. I live in South-East London, although I am happy to work anywhere within a decent motorcycle ride. I have a well-equipped home office and sometimes like to spend time there to avoid office interruptions. I’m not a bums-on-seats kind of person. I’ve worked with large multi-nationals, privately owned companies, and venture capital backed startups from tens to hundreds of people. I’m self-starting, require very little management, am happy to interact with the business and to lead teams if required.
At present I am working with Playfish, a social gaming subsidiary of Electronic Arts, who during the summer of 2011 had the distinction of having the 2nd most popular game on Facebook in The Sims Social, with millions of daily active users and a infrastructure an extent you would expect to support the game, associated services and the remainder of the portfolio.
If you think that we can do some good work together, please by all means drop me an email (sam at domain name) or find me on Twitter. I love talking about this stuff, so even if you’re not yet in the position to hire but would like just to shoot the technical breeze please go ahead and get in touch.
