The Cloud Hacker

Who am I ?

Last of the Gen-X series to roll-off the production line and born in the heart of Teesside. A ginger husband and geek father who has grown up in the shadow of the threat of nuclear war and the birth of the Internet.

I've worked in a range of areas over the years ( check out my { LinkedIn profile } ) with a number of very successful projects to my name, but I'm still learning daily!

My early days of learning were on Microcomputers ( Z80 and 6502 ) with teenage years spent on 68000 and 8086 programming. Since the early 2000's I've been working in systems administration before moving into cloud infrastructure and SRE work.

What do I do ?

I'm a sucker for anything Victorian, especially anything scientific or engineering-focused from that era. If it's steam-powered I'm usually grinning from ear-to-ear and asking questions of the operators. If it's got an electronic circuit I'm often looking at the technical drawings.

I play a variety of instruments including the cigar box guitar. I used to play in a lot of bands in the 1990's but nowadays I just jam with my son or ocassionally friends.

I'm building a cottage garden in my spare time and growing my own fruit and vegetables to make sure I don't spend too much time behind a screen and take the loyal pooch out for walks too.

I sometimes do speaking events like { BSides Newcastle } and even write the odd book when I get bored. If you'd like me to do that sort of thing for you, contact me!

Where do I do it ?

Currently I'm living in the Northeast of England and working for a UK Satellite Imagery Company.

I've been online since the early days of the Internet, lurking in the ethernet and making friends across the planet. I can be found sometimes dwelling in old IRC channels when the fancy takes me, but these days I'm more reclusive.

The Cloud Hacker can be found behind a computer screen, behind a musical instrument or speaking in front of an audience, but you can always guarantee it'll be mostly in black, wearing a bowler hat.

Why TheCloudHacker ?

Life changes, roles change, people change. Change is good and necessary to survive. For many years I was the gingerCoder, working in a world of developers, writing software and working alongside teams.

In recent years I've been working a lot more in an SRE / Operations / Cloud architect style role, maintaining systems and hacking dead stacks back into order. I work in cloud infrastructure so it made sense for a time of change.

I retired my gingerCoder side ( for the most part ) and emerged again, acknowledging that I'm not the man I used to be ( thank goodness* ).

_{* a 5th Incarnation DoctorWho joke}

Brief History

Starting in the world of network administration, TheCloudHacker began life in the Windows NT4 Terminal Services days and followed roles and work to keep food on the table. Migrating from building server rooms with physical tin, through to virtualisation on XenServer and VMWare, the world moved to "Someone else's computer" in the Cloud.

Picking up the DevOps ethos early-on, he moved into SRE roles working in partnership with development teams and continued learning IaC as it became a popular and useful entity.
TheCloudHacker has looked after critical national infrastructure for a nation state, learning daily while training the next generation of operations staff.

Today he works in the Space industry for a satellite imagery company trying to help the world understand the impact we're having on our environment.