Recent History
In 1999 I moved to London and started a 4-year Masters degree in Computing (Software Engineering) from Imperial College. During this time I worked as a sysadmin in the Computing Department’s specialist Computing Support Group, developing a reputation for knowing what I’m talking about as well as being a very useful and helpful person to know.
During an already-busy 2002 I simultaneously became both a full-time student as well as a full-time employee of IBM UK Ltd. when I spent 6 months as an Industrial Trainee working in the Java Technology Centre at IBM Hursley.
I graduated tired but happy in 2003 with my 2‧1 MEng in Software Engineering — and was pleasantly surprised to be offered the opportunity to join the London e-Science Centre as a Research Assosciate, which I accepted. As well as continuing to be a Generally Useful Person, I worked on a range of grid computing systems — including development work on the Large Hadron Collider Compute Grid, which culminated with the integration of the Department’s 400-processor production Mars cluster into the production grid.
Also in 2003, I — along with a few other DoC graduates — established Tastycake.net, a micro-scale hosting service intended to provide us, and a few of our friends, a continuous internet presence for ourselves now that we no-longer had access to Imperial’s hosting resources.
In Oct 2006, looking for a change, I reverted, pumpkin-like, back into a student and embarked on a full-time PhD — still at Imperial — working to put some of my ideas on how to build a better large-scale authentication system into practice.
In Oct 2009, I hadn’t yet finished the PhD but my funding had run out. So I worked part-time as a Unix Systems Administrator for the Bioinformatics Support Service at Imperial. (Which is full of lovely people.)
In Apr 2010, the BSS post sadly came to an end — but fortunately, another one opened up in the Computing Department’s Computing Support Group. Amusingly, despite working on CSG systems frequently over the previous decade, this actually marked the first time I was formally made a member of the staff.
In Oct 2011, I submitted by PhD thesis and was commissioned as a full-time permanent member of staff with CSG — pausing to defend my thesis, successfully, in late February and submitting the final corrected version in mid July.
I continued to work, full-time, for CSG. As I once put it, “I work in IT. My job is to make other peoples’ day better.” This continues to offer up lots of interesting challenges — not least maintaining the Department’s (Linux) computing infrastructure.
In July 2012, I left Imperial (after more than 13 years!) for the University Computing Service at the University of Cambridge, where I joined the Platform’s Group as a Unix Specialist. Among other duties, such as maintaining various bits of internal infrastructure, deploying Ceph in production, and being responsible for 1,000 managed Linux desktops, torwards the tail end of my tenure I was also one of the two Davids who served as email postmaster for the University.
In September 2019, I left Cambridge (and what had become University Information Services) for the Dark Blue Side, and served as a Senior Computer Security Specialist at OxCERT. (While there was the occasional news article that referenced the work of our team, I unfortunately cannot discuss specifics.)
In September 2021, I moved internally within the University of Oxford to join the Department of Statistics where I served as a Senior Computing Specialist, and was responsible for changing an upgrading quite a lot of stuff.
In November 2023, I’m due to start as a Senior Technical Specialist at Durham University’s Computing and Information Services.
Current
Goodness gracious, they made me the Durham DNS hostmsater. Amongst other things. That should keep me busy!
Outside of work, I like to pick up heavy things and put them down again, shoot at pixels, crew LARP festivals as a techie, field medic, or general support person, and — from time to time — getting some well-earned sleep.