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John Wood

Software Engineer, Kubernetes Engineer,
& Systems Engineer

Resume/CV

About Me


Outside of work, I maintain my own server rack at home, providing free website and fileserver hosting for several entities, including 1244 (Swindon) Squadron Air Training Corps, Wiltshire County Pool and Mazz's Disco, among others. The rack also includes my personal media server and storage, along with test & development VMs/containers, and a duplicate backup stack.

I also enjoy music (playing my piano and ukelele), taking apart electronic devices, hacking devices like my webcams, tinkering with new and existing opensource projects, as well as re-working "antique" computer hardware.

Outside, I enjoy walking, adding to my running medals, cycling, SUP, and general adventure-type excursions (think ziplining and Go Ape!). I am also a National Trust and English Heritage member, and support some local museums when I can.

I also volunteer at two of my local Air Cadet squadrons (Swindon and Lyneham), training young people from the ages of 12 to 20 in subjects such as Map Reading, Expedition Training, Radio Communications, Principles of Flight, Aircraft Recognition, drill and discipline, and also providing mentoring and support when necessary.

Fun fact: I haven't had a TV license for 9 years.
Fun fact: I sometimes do extra acting.


Check out my DockerHub for my 500k pull image

Experience

Nationwide Building Society

CI/CD Engineer

Nationwide is the largest building society in the UK, and as such has a requirement for stable and usable facilities to help maintain member's financial security.

I currently maintain CI/CD pipelines and applications which allow developers to focus on development and security researchers to focus on security.

Nationwide CI/CD team works with applications and technology such as AWS, Azure, Github, Harness, Jenkins, Artifactory, Snyk, Dynatrace, ansible, terraform, python, Go, bash, powershell and more.

RED Technology Ltd

Internet Systems Engineer

Red Technology is a Microsoft Gold partner which provides online e-commerce solution websites with features such as customisation, PCI security, multiple payment gateways, DDOS, and more for a number of big brands. In the Technical team, my main role is maintaining the hosting, certificates, domains, DNS, routing & failover, and more for customers, as well as ensuring monitoring and internal services are functioning. General desktop support to internal users is secondary.

Having Docker and Kubernetes knowledge, I started the move of internal services (DNS, portals, proxies, relays, monitoring) from a monolithic Windows environment to Lunix-based Docker images. This allowed the company to properly start moving these images to Kubernetes, with a view to porting customer hosting in the future.

Other projects include introducing Gitlab source control and CI/CD pipelines for the inhouse projects, implementing NetBox for hardware and networking diagnosis, and some small scripts with a view to automating certificate and domain renewal.

D2IQ

Senior Customer Support Engineer

D2IQ provides an independant kubernetes platform service, with options of using various providers (such as AWS, GCP, Azure, EKS, AKS, and on prem).

In my support role, I kept customers HA deployments running smoothly by solving issues (including OOM crashes, cluster certificate issues, DNS problems, deployment & pod breakdowns) and researching KB articles to assist future out-of-band questions. I assisted in internal verification of issues and enhancements, such as coding, alternate operating systems and inserting new components into the core stack. I utilised my technical writing experience to contribute to user facing documentation, as well as internal technical instructions and processes.

With D2IQ, I obtained my CKA qualification, and I am slowly working towards my CKS.

Openda Ltd

Senior Developer and Technical Support Specialist

Openda is a small company that develops and supports their own in-house CRM/ERP business software solution, entirely written in Progress Openedge.

Openda markets their user-focused QX software system to SMEs with the slogan "Simplicity, Clarity, Speed", alongside providing knowledgable IT Support where needed for networking, servers and desktops, Office365, phone systems, backups and more.

With Openda, I have been involved in projects as diverse as API integration, end-customer documentation, bug-fixing and testing, database optimisation, virtualisation, server and server-room setup, customer site-wide backup strategies, mobile app development and much more.

Plymouth Mobile Software Solutions

Lead Developer/Technical Manager

Specialising in barcode and handheld solutions, they provided solutions to many ferry services and water taxis

Whilst there, I developed many small inventory solutions for lot-tracable companies with low-volume products, as well as supporting existing mobile units, contacting repair centres and flashing custom-developed firmware.

Education

Plymouth College of Further Education

June - September 2001

HND (partial)

Data Structures and Algorithms, from the HND Computing course.

Universiy of Plymouth

September 1999 - June 2001

BSc Computing (partial)

Modules included Software Engineering, Mathematical Statistics, Algorithm Theory, Computer Architecture and History, Computer Networks, and group projects.

New College, Swindon

September 1997 - June 1999

A-Level

Completed subjects in Computing, Maths and Physics

Highworth Warneford School

September 1993 - June 1997

General Certificate of Secondary Education

Obtained qualifications in Computing, English (Literature and Language), Maths, Science (Single and Double), Geography, Electronics, Design and Communication and French.

Notable Projects

Project

Kubernetes Migration

Upon joining RED Technology, I took the lead on configuring a test cluster as POC, and developed a process for converting internal custom-built projects into container images, which allowed the company to move and manage infrastructure on a HA Kubernetes cluster.

This was a precursor to moving customer hosting from monolithic Windows environments, to a more flexible, dynamic, hardware-agnostic HA environment.

Skills/Tools/Technologies
- CKA, Kubernetes, Docker, source control,

Project

Raspberry Pi Android Auto

When I purhcased by previous car, I wanted to listen to my podcasts on long journeys and commutes, so that need took me down a rabbit hole that ended up with my installing a Raspberry Pi into my car complete with touchscreen to run Android Auto.

You can see my writeup here.

Skills/Tools/Technologies
- Electronics, imaging, Github

NPL MSF clock

Decode MSF Atomic Clock

[https://bitbucket.org/kolon/my-pi-projects/src/master/raspi-clock-radio/acr-atomic.py]
As part of my alarm clock project, I managed to decode the NPL's MSF atomic clock signals to get accurate date and time. I disassembled a working digital clock to extract the receiver antenna, and used general GPIO on a Raspberry Pi to extrapolate the MSF signals.

Skills/Tools/Technologies
- Python, StackExchange, Wikipedia

Dynamic Threading in Python

[https://bitbucket.org/kolon/my-pi-projects/src/master/raspi-clock-radio/acr.py]
Whilst it has been possible to use threads in Pyhton for some time, there is no method described for launching a custom thread after execution has started.
I spent a lot of time researching the treading architechture of python and produced code for my alarm clock project that defines dynamic threads, checking if a thread is running, and launches new threads when one is missing.

Skills/Tools/Technologies
- Python, Python manual, Stackexchange

Project

Magento API integration

As part of development for Openda's QX business system, I managed to work around Magento's very poor API to export products, attributes, prices, and stock quantities, and import orders, payments and carrier tracking information.

There were numerous issues to overcome during development, including bugs in the Magento core code (which were reported to the Magento team), mismatched APIs, and very little documentation.

Skills/Tools/Technologies
Openedge, PHP, Postman, curl, json

Project

Setup, Configure and manage a VMWare VSAN


A customer required a private cloud-like environment for live production websites and bespoke backend processing, as well as the associated development environments. This involved the setup of three large servers, installing and configuring VMWare VSAN, load- and failure-testing the setup, before migrating the existing systems from the old hardware.
Part of the process was researching datacentres to host the platform, employing monitoring tools, configuring redundant network feeds, analysing data throughput and altering DNS records.

Skills/Tools/Technologies
VMWare ESX, VMWare VSAN, scripting, 10Gbit SFP cabling, switch stacking, VLAN, DNS, linux

Project

Docker image for get-iplayer

[https://hub.docker.com/r/kolonuk/get_iplayer]

Although I don't have a TV licence, I actively maintain an auto-updating Docker image that has over 100k pulls which helps make the use of get_iplayer much easier and with almost zero configuration needed.

Skills/Tools/Technologies
Bash script, dockerfile, linux, API

Detailed Skills and Knowledge Areas

Contact

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