I am the CTO and Co-Founder of DevOpsGuysand a Microsoft Regional Director.

I started in IT in 1990 as a junior programmer subcontracted to IBM working on mainframe systems management software (Netview). After about 3 years of this I decided I wasn’t well suited to spending my whole life behind a desk and I wanted a more hands-on role, so I got involved in setting up a server and local area network in my companies office (at the time this was Novell Netware 3.x and Winfows For Workgroups 3.11).

I then started supporting Microsoft LanManager and other Microsoft systems. Over the next 15 or so years I worked my way up through 1st/2nd/3rd line support into senior engineering and technical architecture roles, with an increasing specialisation (since 1998) in Microsoft web hosting platforms based in Windows NT / Windows Server and IIS. When I moved to the UK in 1999 I worked in that capacity for large enterprise organisations like BNP Paribas, Vodafone, CSFB etc.

In 2005 I moved to Totaljobs as their web operations manager, running their online job board platform which is based on high-volume Windows/.Net/IIS/SQL Server platform.

After leaving Totaljobs in 2008 I had had a series of roles around web operations, monitoring and performance leading up to the founding of DevOpsGuys, one of UK leading DevOps consultancies and a Microsoft Gold partner in 2013.

My involvement in the DevOps community grew via extensive blogging, presenting at conferences like QCON, Atmosphere and different London DevOps Meetups (including our own DevOps Cardiff) we felt that the Microsoft and Windows community was significantly under-represented by the existing DevOps meetups so we coined the term #Winops and organised the first ever “DevOps on Windows” conference WinOpsConf in Sept 2015 and so we decided to follow this up with a regular monthly meetup WinOpsLDN.