Pither.com

Personal Details

• E-mail address: simon@pither.com
• Phone number: 07711 187013
• Nationality: British
• Age: 30

Suitable Work

• Development/programming - Grails, Java, Perl, Ruby and PHP
• Linux system administration/support/consultancy
• Freelance, contract or project
• Located in London or the South East (or remote working)

Summary

• 15 years (13 commercial) of programming and development including Java and Perl
• 11 years (8 commercial) of Linux system administration using mainly Debian and Ubuntu in large, clustered environments
• 3 years of team management
• 2 years of technical strategy and systems architecture design
• 5 years working with e-learning, especially e-portal software and service provision

Key Skills

My skills cover the full life cycle from inception and design through development, debugging and quality assurance, onto delivery and maintenance. I have regularly taken the role of both a software developer and a systems administrator and have the ability to consider all aspects of a project including code management and maintainability, deployability, scalability and real life usage.

Programming/Development

• Java (inc. large applications, speed and memory profiling)
• SQL
• Perl
• HTML/CSS
• Delphi, Pascal
• Ruby
• Python
• Prolog

System Administration

• Linux (Ubuntu/Debian, SUSE, Redhat)
• Unix (Solaris)
• Networking (TCP/IP, HTTP(S), SMTP, POP3, DNS, ARP, ICMP, etc)
• Network debugging (tcpdump, ethereal, etc)
• Internet services (apache, exim, bind, courier, mysql, etc)
• Clustering (LVS, keepalive, FAI, etc)
• System monitoring (mon, nagios)
• Security and firewalling
• spamassassin, clamav
• BGP (zebra)

Education

• Sun Certified Java Programmer (October 1999)
• BSc (Hons) Computer Science (University of Kent, 1999)
• A-level A's in Computing and Mathematics (Lewes Tertiary College, 1996)
• 9 GCSEs C and above, including Maths, English and Science (Priory School, Lewes 1994)
• Unley High School, South Australia - Aug 1992 to March 1993
• Tideway Secondary School, Newhaven - Sept 1990 to July 1992

Work Experience

January 2007 onwards

Freelance development and systems administration work.

August 2001 - December 2006

Digtalbrain Plc provides a web based e-Learning platform to nearly 1.5 million registered users. One of their largest customers is the London Grid for Learning, providing services to every school in London.

During my time at Digitalbrain I have progressed through three roles, improving my development skills and gaining experience in large system deployment and administration.

• Technical Architect (Feb 2006 - Aug 2006) Actively developing (Java) and testing key new technologies and products. Creating deployment systems (with Debian/Ubuntu packaging and FAI) and overseeing them onto production platforms.
• Head of Internet Systems (Jan 2003 - Feb 2006) Responsible for the smooth running and rapid expansion of the platform to support over a million users.
• Systems Administrator (Aug 2001 - Jan 2003) Working in a small team to maintain the company's e-Learning and e-Portal platform.

November 2000 - July 2001

Under new management, Network Advantage became known as PAD (London) Ltd. In the role of Support Manager key tasks that I was responsible for included:-

• Consultation, specification and implementation of Internet and office based solutions.
• General network design and implementation, including the use of assorted firewall and VPN technologies as well as Linux and Windows based servers.
• Responsibility for telephone and on-site support, including the introduction of a 24 hour support service for a wide range of clients. Supported systems ranged from the Novell Netware office systems of a national accountancy company to the Sun Solaris, Windows 2000 and Linux based web and e-mail services of a major conferencing organisation.

June 1999 - October 2000

Full time work at Network Advantage. During this time I worked in three main job roles:-

• Support Manager - Responsibility for the support of over 500 windows based, server and workstation systems. Management responsibility for the support engineer job role.
• Web/Database Programmer (3 months) - I worked in a small team of developers to create a database driven property site. Produced with Perl and MySQL, running on SuSE Linux.
• Support Engineer (6 months) - In this role I was responsible for responding to client telephone and on site support requirements. Troubleshooting desktops and servers, hardware and software systems.

October 1998 - May 1999

Part time work on the University of Kent Computing Helpdesk, dealing with users general inquiries and problems.

July - August 1998 and January 1999

Full time Computer Technician at Eastbourne College of Arts and Technology. During this time I also wrote and taught several one day courses for the college. The subjects I taught included: HTML, Word 97 introduction and intermediate.

1994 - 1998

During this time I had an assortment of private consultancy jobs which included developing custom software applications, add-ons, training, systems building and support.

My customers included:-

• The Pakistan British Chamber of Commerce and Industry
• South East England Tourist Board
• Intercon Scaffolding
• Eastbourne College of Arts and Technology
• Private individuals

Hobbies and Interests

• Squash, badminton and swimming
• Dancing - lindy hop, salsa and jive
• Kyushindo Judo - black belt
• Driving - I have a full English driving license
• Computing - always more to learn