I see you're curious about who exactly I am?

TL;DR:

• Nerd
• Started on the help desk
• Climbed my way up to the cloud (pun intended)
• DevOps/ Platform engineer at the UK's largest pet care company

I got in to IT when I was studying at the American School of Bombay and was inspired by my Tech teacher (Mr. J. Laub) who taught me the basics of how the network at school worked, as well as Savio from the tech desk who patiently explained every answer to my questions. If it wasn't for moving to India and these people, I don't know where I would be now.

My big break in to IT was after I finished school in 2018, I worked at Focus International, in the warehouse picking client orders.

I know, you're wondering what Ellesse shirts and shoes has to do with IT, well, this job provided me with the money to purchase servers and a 48U server rack.  From here I really started to learn linux, and moved my daily driver over to Linux mint to force my self to learn things. I'm not sure why I got fancy monitors for my computer when I spend 90% of my time in a terminal window, but eh.

Moving on.

I had to enroll in education till I was 18, so I decided to go to technical college and do a Level 3 BTEC in IT.

I absolutely hated it. At risk of sounding like a complete jerk and know it all, these lectures were below me. It was so bad to the point that I discovered that you can vlan hop and was able to get on to management VLAN's before reporting my findings to the college.

After around 3-4 months (I forget) I dropped out and found an apprenticeship in network engineering, which is what I really wanted to go in to. The interviews went well and I started in January.

I had my hopes and dreams crushed when on my first day it was explained to me that I would in fact not be engineering networks, but instead a level 1 Helpdesk engineer.

No this was not a setback, despite the negative note. I can now say with 100% confidence that everyone who works in IT should work on the Helpdesk at some point. It teaches you problem solving as well as knowing some sneaky tricks to get users to listen to you.

After about a year and a bit, I was fedup. I wanted to become a linux system administrator, but was using windows on a day to day basis. Not helping my cause

I was approached by a recruiter from Texas who was looking for Junior system administrators. I had nothing to lose so jumped ship.

After about 6-8 months (Exact numbers escape me) I was put on a client project and told to basically learn cloud. I never had any intention to go in to cloud, in fact I wanted to become a NOC engineer.

I had my title changed from Junior systems engineer to Cloud Engineer after proving I was reliable and delivered.

I spent a lot of time working on client engagement and getting my GCP Professional Cloud Architect certification.

After a year and 6 months, I decided the time was right to move on to a new company.

Roll on finance

I moved to another cloud consultancy, this time it was a german company. I seem to have a thing for International companies.

Stayed there for 6 months (I am not proud to admit this) before I was head hunted for the company I am currently at.

If you want to see what I am up to, you can check my CV

My career goal?

Not sure, what I do know is I want to become a cloud god, start a company that is the one stop shop for any start up, we have developers, UI/UX teams, cloud engineers, you name it, we're the place to go to launch your startup!

As always, you can contract me if you want help or contact me if you just want to chat!