About Me

Hi, I am Mark, an IT/Tech Vet with 20+ years experience in various technical and leadership disciplines.

I am an architect and engineer at heart with a passion for security, site reliability engineering, data and any science related subjects. A big geek, with an appreciation for pop culture nerd humour. An amateur cryptologist with a great passion for the history of cryptography, in-fact I am a friend and patron of Bletchley Park. This passion started after I read ‘The Code Book’ by Simon Singh, and I try to read the book once every couple of years because I find it fascinating. The need to send secure commuinications has excisted throughout most of human history, and I think the stories behind that make it so important to keep that history alive.

What Is This Blog For?

As you can probably tell, I need practice as a blogger, and to do that, I need a blog to keep me committed to writing articles that some of you may find interesting and helpful.

What I Do?

Question all the things. Always question all the things.
Furious Yak Shaving.
Collect metrics from everything, even Humans.
Fix all the things. In legacy and not so legacy environments.
Build all the things. CI/CD Pipelines, cloud platforms and neat elastic band creations.
Code all the things. I use Python and Golang as my tools of choice. I have authored/contributed to many internal tooling projects in my career, which means I’m down with Developer Experience……apparently.

Passions:

Comedy. I like jokes
Films/TV Shows
Science
Reading & Podcasts
Travelling

Books Read in 2024

How Westminster Works…and Why It Doesn’t by Ian Dunt

Books Read in 2023

Think Like a CTO by Alan Williamson
The Staff Engineers Path by Tanya Reilly
Seven Ways to Change the World by Gordon Brown
Wiring the Winning Organisation by Gene Kim & Steven J. Spear

Books Read in 2022

Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the mangagement track by Will Larson
AWS Security by Dylan Shields
The Mathematics of Secrets by Joshua Holden
We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins

Books Read in 2021

The Visual MBA by Jason Barron
What Everyone Needs To Know About Tax: An Introduction to the UK Tax SYstem by James Hannam
Radical Candor by Kim Scott
The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen
Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim
How Spies Think by David Omand

Books Read in 2020

Dune by Frank Herbert
Linear Regression and Correlation by Scott Hartshorn
Make Your Bed by William H. McRaven
Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan
The Art of Statistics by David John Spiegelhalter
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh
Quiet by Susan Cain

Books Read in 2019

Python Pattern Designs by Kamon Ayeva & Sakis Kasampalis
User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn
The Great Silence by Milan Cirkovic

Books Read in 2018

The Simpsons & Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh
17 Equations That Changed The World by Ian Stewart
Probability - A Beginners Guide To Permutations and Combinations
Chancing It by Robert Matthews
The Science Of Interstellar by Kip Thorne

Books Read in 2017

Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh
Naked Trader by Robbie Burns
Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlift
Big Bang by Simon Singh
Why does E=mc2 by Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw

Books Read in 2016

How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
The Code Book by Simon Singh
How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie