Hello!
From a professional standpoint, I’ve been in full time employment as a web app developer since the late 90’s. Starting with simple websites in the 90s, then moving on to bespoke web apps for clients in the 2000s. In the 2010’s I started writing more serious web apps such as a custom ecommerce platform from scratch with full auditing. All the while I’ve been involved in the devops side of things – running Linux servers hosting everything I’ve worked on.
In terms of devops, I’ve always had a keen interest in Linux, servers, networking and that kind of thing. In 2014 I planned and implemented a high availability solution for the Crossrail website so that it could handle intense traffic when mentioned in the news. Later in my career when things became cloud based I was responsible for managing various AWS resources and now I’m responsible for our Azure estate in my current job.
I strive to keep up to date, not only to invest in myself, but because I find things interesting. For example, I run local LLMs to assist me in my work (coding, writing etc.) Efficiency is something I strive towards in my work, offloading repetitive tasks onto scripts etc.