About the Author
I have spent more years than I’d like to remember working in IT – primarily infrastructure within the finance industry. I am by nature an inquisitive person and from an early age would disassemble mechanical and electric toys to try to understand how they work and this approach to life has served me well in that I have few formal qualifications but I’d estimate at least a degree in the University of Life!
After a brief period working in the electronics industry – Broadcasting and Space & Defence I started working in the seismic industry initially in the field where my inquisitive nature allowed me to learn the rudiments of the data acquisition end of things and latterly in the back-end data processing side and it was here that my electronics skills augmented my learning about programming in particular low-level interfacing of devices to mini/mainframe computers. The company I worked for had seismic crews scattered across the globe, some in remote locations where it was expedient to process data locally before shipping back to the UK based HQ.
This meant we had to fault-find and repair to chip level mini-computers, at the time these were mainly DEC Vax ranges from the 11/750 to the 11/780 and gave a great introduction and insight into how software/firmware interacts with the physical hardware.
These days I freelance in the City of London architecting systems ranging from BigData running flavours of Hadoop and monitoring systems as part of the increasing requirements for financial industries to adhere to Regulatory & Compliance regulations.
In my spare time I dabble with IoT devices and have numerous projects on the go to utilise these for numerous home automation purposes.
I have diverse interests outside of IT and electronics – music, photography, fine woodwork and a bit of metal bashing – turning and welding.