About

Hi there! I’m Alan, a DevOps Engineer who’s been in tech long enough to remember dial-up modems and long enough to know there’s always more to learn. I focus on automation, cloud infrastructure, and trying not to break things (too often). I build tools and pipelines that help teams ship better software, faster and ideally without anyone having to stay up all night fixing bugs in production.

I’m curious by nature, a bit of a tinkerer, and I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) that no one has all the answers but good documentation, a helpful team, and a solid “git diff” can get you a long way.

Professional Journey

My journey started back in the ‘80s with a ZX Spectrum. That curiosity led to a career that now spans nearly 20 years. I started in the mid-2000s as a Multimedia Developer and IT Lead, building interactive content and managing servers. In 2010, I launched my own consultancy, HyperStream, where I wore too many hats and learned a lot about how not to burn out while automating everything I could get my hands on.

After that, I moved into the enterprise world, spending seven years at Omnicom Media Group in London as an Infrastructure & DevOps Engineer. I worked across a huge IT estate, supporting over 100 agencies and tens of thousands of users. I helped with cloud migrations, onboarded new acquisitions, and built deployment pipelines before they were cool. I also learned that even when you think something is “fully automated,” someone still needs to read the logs at 2 AM.

Since 2022, I’ve been working at SciBite (an Elsevier company), helping modernize the infrastructure behind a scientific data platform. These days I’m deep in AWS and Azure, setting up CI/CD pipelines, containerizing apps, and occasionally muttering at YAML files. I work closely with developers and customers to roll out new features with observability and single sign-on baked in. The stack is modern, the pace is fast, and I’m still learning every day, sometimes from my mistakes, often from others, and occasionally from Stack Overflow.

Skills & Tools

I’ve worked with a lot of tech over the years, some of it shiny and new, some of it held together with duct tape and cron jobs. Here’s a snapshot of my current toolkit:

  • Cloud Infrastructure: AWS and Azure (and all their glorious acronyms)
  • CI/CD Pipelines: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD
  • Containers & Orchestration: Docker and Kubernetes, when they behave
  • Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, logs, alerts, and tea
  • Automation & Scripting: Terraform, Go, Ansible, Python, Bash (and a love/hate relationship with YAML)

What I Believe

I don’t think being a great engineer is about knowing everything, no one does. For me, it’s about:

  • Learning constantly: Tech moves fast. I try to keep up, or at least fall behind gracefully.
  • Building reliably: If it falls over on a weekend, was it really done?
  • Thinking long-term: I avoid shortcuts that turn into “tech debt with interest.”
  • Automating wisely: Automate almost everything, but don’t automate accountability.
  • Owning your mistakes: Things break. When they do, own it, learn from it, and move on.
  • Figuring it out: When faced with a challenge, we’ll figure it out, together if needed. That’s the job.
  • Sharing knowledge: I believe in mentoring and passing on what I’ve learned, because we all started somewhere.
  • Putting people first: Ultimately, it’s about the people behind the screen. Technology should serve them, and how we build it should be ethical, inclusive, and human-focused.

Outside of Work

I live in a quiet village in Essex where I work from home and try to maintain a healthy balance between terminal windows and real life. I practice Taekwondo, attempt to meditate daily, and get inspired regularly by my creative daughter. We also have a pet rabbit named Ginny who insists on living like a queen in the living room.

Let’s Connect

If you’ve made it this far, thanks! I’m always happy to connect with folks who enjoy building things, automating the boring stuff, or just want to swap DevOps horror stories. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or drop me a message. I’d love to hear from you.

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