With a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, I have worked in many different companies in different roles over 20 years both in permanent and contracting roles. Experience includes development using many languages including C, Perl, C++, Java, BASH, and more, system administration of 200 Linux servers, performance testing of web sites and complex CORBA applications, overseeing the architecture of a nationwide data network, porting of existing code bases from one language to another, implementation of reported bug fixes, automation of manual tasks, establishment of monitoring, and many other assorted tasks.
What I bring is a very broad experience base that allows end-to-end understanding of complex technical systems. If you have an issue it could be in any of the following components:
- networking, be it physical Ethernet, TCP configuration, or even a Java library that restricts the number of simultaneous connections you may have open
- operating system, from heavy CPU load, to thread contention, or high disk I/O
- application, from a loop not terminating and consuming whole CPU cores, to an instance where someone wrote their own multithreading lock library in Java that resulted in deadlocks
I’ve seen all of these things in the wild and I’ve often been the first to identify and find these issues.
When your specialists have failed to figure out what is causing your technology related issues – that’s when you need an experienced generalist, and that is me.