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Software, containers, distributed systems
I love making, understanding & explaining code
My background and core competence is systems software engineering, but I love the whole process of building products. I've been in startups that have succeeded and others that have failed. I enjoy writing code, and understanding how other people will use it. I'm now the technology evangelist with container security specialists Aqua Security. I'm also co-chairing the KubeCon / CloudNativeCon 2018 events in Copenhagen, Shanghai and Seattle.
When I'm not working you'll quite likely find me on a bike (I race for Team Fearless on Zwift), at a gig, eating & drinking with friends, doing yoga or drumming. I'm a mediocre drummer at best, but it's fun!
Where I get over my British reserve and admit that I'm pretty good at these
I spent the first, well, many years of my professional life writing and architecting portable network stack implementations. I love and understand how to make clean, well-architected code.
And C, if I really have to. Go is really my language of choice these days. Some things are on my GitHub profile (and ask me about the projects that aren't open source).
Containers, Kubernetes and security
I've been working with containers for several years. I'm a fan of Kubernetes and, since joining Aqua, I've learned a thing or two about the security aspects of using containers and distributed systems.
A brief history of my education and experience
I read engineering at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and did a post-graduate year in Real Time Information Processing at École Centrale Paris. I had internships at Marconi Space Systems (I think all the satellites I worked on are space junk now, sadly) and Schlumberger. Ask me about the time I left their laptop in a taxi - I'm still embarrassed about that, and much more careful with hardware.
I joined what was then Data Connection, now Metaswitch Networks, writing portable network protocol software. I'm pretty sure you'll have used some of it as a consumer, blissfully unaware that I had anything to do with it. By the time I left I was VP Customer Services, running a team of engineers supporting OEM software labs around the world.
I stepped away from coding to become a Product Manager at Skype, which at that time was a tiny office in Soho, London, packed with talented people in all sorts of disciplines I'd never really known anything about before, like marketing and business development. Learnt SO MUCH. After that I worked at music recommendations site Last.fm, running APIs and partner integrations.
Not long after I had decided to branch out into my own consultancy business, I was approached to help set up an innovation team in The Valley with my old friends at Metaswitch. This involved camping out in Sequoia's offices (ask me stories about bike rides with billionaires) and then establishing our own place in downtown Palo Alto. We had a fantastic 18 months building and launching a mobile app called Thrutu, which was downloaded by over half a million people.
Returning to London I co-founded a TV recommendations startup called Tank Top TV, which was funded by Telefonica and won various awards before hitting the wall. I learnt a ton more about recommender systems and machine learning, not to mention the whole host of non-technical things you encounter running a business.
Then I joined my long-time friends Anne Currie and Ross Fairbanks, who had started exploring this technology called "containers", to form Microscaling Systems. I was hooked. I loved coming back to my original working world of systems engineering. As far as we know we were the first to show real-time container scaling, and we also build container metadata tool MicroBadger.
I'm now part of the team at Aqua Security. We build a platform to help enterprises secure their container deployments. I speak at conferences and events around the world about container- and security-related technology, and I also look after our open source projects Kube-bench and Manifesto.
