Consulting / Managing / Architect / Advocate
I have spent the past 4/5 years in a ‘Services Consultant and Solution Architecture’ role at IBM and then Informatica.
I'm used to leading technical direction and designing solutions whilst also getting on with the technical work.
I have experience of supervising support and engineering staff both onsite and offshore. Recently this was with a Python
and Integration engineering project, prior to that supporting and advocating for a large big data project on the IBM
Cloud, and also supervising offshore Java engineers for an MDM project, which included travel to India.
As part of a previous IBM labs role, I was also an Advocate for IBM software products and engineering on them. I
frequently visited customers to talk about this, and spoke at a lot of conferences in many different countries, had
articles published. I also ran open source projects on behalf of IBM.
Data Engineering
I am used to designing, using, performing ETL/data integration across many different systems. As well as hard coding ETL
using Python, I have also installed and used platforms to handle this which includes products from Informatica, IBM,
Microsoft, Databricks.
As part of software engineering projects, integration requirements, consultancy etc I have done a lot of work with
Databases and SQL. I'm no master DBA but have worked on creating data models, schemas, databases, tables, views, reports
on DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite and nosql when required.
For the last year I have spent most of my time working on data platform solutions using a combination of Informatica
DEI, Microsoft Azure and Databricks. Therefore I have experience of engineering data platform solutions for data lake,
lake house/delta lake purposes using these platforms, with additional linux, python, etl, Azure cloud skills from source
through ingestion and on to the processing layers. In addition, I understand and can design the dev/data ops processes
around this orchestration.
Software Engineering
I have been a professional software engineer in various languages and on lots of platforms for most of my career. I can
(and love to) learn new ones.
I have written code in Java, JavaScript, Python, React, Node.js, Electron, HTML, CSS and more over the years. I am used
to Git, code pipelines and writing code for on prem and in the cloud (especially on web servers, web applications and
using REST API’s).
For the most recent software engineering I spent most of 2019 designing and coding a Python 3 framework on RHEL Linux
platform to perform data integration and automation functions across systems at a large Bank.
I was also a full-time software engineer within IBM labs for 11 years. For most of those years I wrote Java, as well as
other languages such as JavaScript and other web technologies.
Cloud Engineering
I spent many years working for IBM SmartCloud. This involved writing software for and supporting cloud-based software.
So I understand the nature of software delivery in a cloud environment and how you have to engineer this to have 99.9%
uptime.
Most of my current experience is with Azure and pretty much understand and have experience of the full stack from
networking/security through compute/storage (including adls2), Data Factory, logic apps/functions, key vaults etc and
with my software engineering skills I can design or build complete end to end solutions, whatever the requirement.
I have also worked with AWS and understand similar concepts to Azure but not with the same depth.
eDiscovery
Part of my Consultancy role at IBM was around a product StoredIQ (eDiscovery). I installed and configured this product (linux containerised appliance) at various organisations and then designed data capture and analysis (regex mainly) using the product in order to assess the data landscape for GDPR purposes, data retention, mergers and aquisitions data discovery.
In addition to StoredIQ I also worked extensively with a product StoredIQ For Legal (they do connect but otherwise are completely different). I can install, configure, develop on and integrate this product in the enterprise. I can therefore write BPMN as a workflow developer and know the consult and data model required to use this product as a Legal Hold management system.
Data Governance
As well as GDPR projects using StoredIQ, I have also worked on Master Data Management (MDM) projects as part of a data governance strategy. I can install and configure IBM Websphere and Information Server together with MDM components. I can also consult on the data strategy and write extensions to the main product in Java. As an extension to this I can also work with IBM MQ and IBM BPM and setup the DB2 or Oracle databases.
I have also worked on metadata catalog projects, curating a master catalog of metadata and data resources across the enterprise to provide insight into where data is, what type, what is the quality and what does the lineage look like.
Other stuff
As part of enterprise projects I have worked on I am experienced in Linux, SSO, email, Databases - Oracle, DB2, SQlite, MySQL, SQL Server, NoSQL, PostGreSQL (i'm no DBA but I know what I need to get by), networking both at a TCP level and the actual cabling, server hardware building, Microsoft Exchange
