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.
