About

Hello, my name is Chris. I am an Infrastructure Security Engineer and Pluralsight author, who has been variously employed as a DevOps Engineer, Developer, Data Engineer and Infrastructure Analyst. I have extensively studied Cyber Security and hold an MSc in Computing from Cardiff University in the UK. I have a current CISSP certification, plus Okta Consultant and Developer certifications.

Current Interests

All things Python, enterprise IAM & authentication.

Personal Brand

I’ve built a career being a technical leader who brings a broad knowledge, other people and their experience together to solve a problem. I’m simultaneously someone who can acquire specialist understanding, and translate it to audiences of differing technical ability.

Background

I began solving computing problems during my undergraduate degree (2009-2012) and in my first job as a data analyst (2012-2013). I automated a six day per week job down to two days, reclaimed my evenings and spent the other three days searching for somewhere that would teach me to code.

In the time since, I’ve worked at companies from 20-1000 people, always acting as an internal expert on technologies that were in use and often teaching new skills to people around me.

Between March 2019 and March 2021 I worked in a team of four software engineers at a company in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry. We worked hard to push modern development practices and technology into an industry that can be very slow to change. I had a wide variety of responsibilities handling DevOps, security and tool building. I touched all aspects of the computing infrastructure at the company, from laptops to cloud servers and serverless applications to networking. A major highlight of my time at the company was producing an API and client for creating/managing customer deliverables. I wrote Python every day, with all new code bases tested to 100% coverage and continuously integrated to our main branches.

In 2021 I largely worked for myself, which taught me just how much I value the ability work independantly. The independence gave me the confidence to become much more selective about companies I accept permanent, full-time work from. In January 2022 I was able to join a company whose mission & engineering I have respected for years. Since joining that company, I’ve grown from Senior to a Staff contributor and now largely control the direction of internal IAM within the business.

Other Opinions

Some people whose opinions I respect very much have been kind enough to say these words about me.

“Chris brings a wealth of knowledge and an appetite to take on challenges. He communicates clearly and is not shy to provide his very useful opinions. I learned a lot working with him and think he’d be an excellent addition to anyone’s team.” George Polack, Principal Software Architect, Movellus.

“Working with Chris has been a true pleasure. He’s focused and driven when he needs to work, but patient and understanding when explaining and mentoring. A great leader with exceptional wit – hopefully I get to work with him again in the future!” Gerrit Steinbach, Full Stack Engineer, Movellus.

“Chris has a great aptitude for quickly picking up new technology and implementing it and is passionate about data. We were sorry to lose him and he would be a great asset for any organization that wishes to collect, analyse, understand and use data.” Martin Grindley, VP Operations and Testing, Polecat.

“Chris is a great employee with a knack of getting to the root of the problem, and the ability to communicate the issue and solution effectively to others. A true unicorn I was sad to see leave.” Andrew Breeze, Principal Data and Infrastructure Analyst (Higher Education Funding Council for England).