| Name | Ross Golder |
|---|---|
| Nationality | British |
| Date of birth | 20th November 1976 |
An enthusiastic IT professional, with a broad range of technical skills and experience.
Recent Work Experience 🔗
For the last few years, I have been working in a DevOps/Infra/SRE team for a financial services company based in Bangkok, where I have primarily been tasked with supporting and maintaining the physical hardware and networking equipment for our bare-metal servers colocated at datacentres across South East Asia. I also work with the team to develop and support various EKS clusters and other AWS-based resources. As a senior team member, I am often involved in design, security and production review meetings, and provide advice and mentorship to engineers from various teams. Recently, I have been working on improvements to our datacentre monitoring systems, documenting our regular maintenence procedures and preparing plans to replace some older servers.
Before that, I was involved in transitioning legacy merchant website applications and development practices to use Docker containers, and setting up CI/CD and hosting production on Kubernetes in the cloud and our staging environments on bare metal in the office. As well as speeding up the development process, this allowed the applications to scale, which reduced the single points of failure, which increased the general resilience and up-time of the applications.
Background 🔗
I have been working remotely full-time since 1999. My main area of experience is network and systems engineering, working with TCP/IP networks, routing/firewalls, Linux servers, virtual machines. I am also experienced and comfortable working in Python, Go, C, Java and several other programming and scripting languages, from small tools and scripts to large applications. I am staunch advocate of decentralisation, and have been following the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry closely since 2012.
In my spare time, I help run a local sailing club where we teach youngsters to sail and compete at various national events throughout the year. At certain times of the year, when the wind is a bit stronger, I enjoy kite-surfing.
Reference Links 🔗
Recent qualifications 🔗
Employment History 🔗
June 2020 to December 2023
- Omise/OPN Crystal Design Center 1448/4, J2 Building Soi Ladprao 87 Praditmanutham Road, Klongchan, Bang Kapi Thailand 10240
In this role, I have primarily been tasked with supporting and maintaining the physical hardware and networking equipment for our bare-metal servers colocated at datacentres across South East Asia. I also work with the team to develop and support various EKS clusters and other AWS-based resources. As a Senior team member, I am often involved in design, security and production review meetings, and provide advice and mentorship to engineers from various teams. Recently, I have been working on improvements to our datacentre monitoring systems, documenting our regular maintenence procedures and preparing plans to replace some older servers.
October 2002 to June 2020
- Agent Design Ltd 91 Great Union Road St Helier Jersey Channel Islands JE2 3WA
During this time, I was largely been responsible for covering the backups, monitoring and security maintenance responsibilities for my existing client’s network infrastructure, spread across various service providers, but was also involved in creating the automated build/test/deploy stages of a CI/CD pipeline to provide for important additional QA steps to be added to the live release procedure for our main e-commerce sites. The majority of my work involved managing Kubernetes clusters using Terraform across AWS, Azure, GCP and custom clusters on other hosting providers, as well as writing custom python code for the provisioning of services with those clusters.
January 2007 to now
- R.O.S.S. Golder Ltd 349/1 Moo 6 Thong Chai Bang Saphan Prachuab Kirikhan Thailand 77190
On returning to Thailand, I started this consultancy company in order to acquire the necessary legal framework to continue to provide services for my international clients while supporting my family here.
April 2006 to December 2006:
- Freelance technical consultant Spring Bank Brook Street Kingston Blount Oxfordshire England OX39 4RZ
I returned to work in the UK again, providing the services to my previous employers and clients. During this time, I was mostly responsible for reworking a large and hastily created web application. The original author had hard-coded the HTML, CSS and Javascript into monolithic PHP scripts. I began a process of reworking the monolithic scripts into libraries of shared common code and moving the hard-coded layout and styling code into a set of templates that use XSLT to generate the HTML in a more consistent and easily maintainable fashion. I was also responsible for assisting the other developers in implementing new features and modifying existing features of the site as dictated by the constantly changing circumstances of the business.
October 2002 to March 2006:
- ‘Managing Director’ Golder Software Systems Ltd 349/1 Moo 6 Thong Chai BangSaphan PrachuabKirikhan Thailand 77190
I moved to Thailand to be with my girlfriend, and set up a small software development company in order to support us financially. My primary business was development of various in-house database-driven web applications (using PHP) for a new client in Jersey, along with consultancy and support for their network services and infrastructure. I also provided on-going support for them and my other previous employers.
June 2001 to September 2002:
- ‘Software Engineer’ Nildram Ltd Ardenham Court Oxford Rd Aylesbury Buckinghamshire HP19 8HX
Reporting directly to the Technical Director, I was tasked with developing a new internal web-site, to be used by their front-line technical support team and service provisioning staff. I was also involved in helping the third-level support team with various technical queries related to the web and mail servers which were running a combination of Linux and FreeBSD. While the majority of my work involved PHP development, I was also involved in helping install and test new network services. I also spent time building and debugging network service applications written in C. I thoroughly enjoyed this role, and learned a lot about network traffic analysis, systems management, monitoring and disaster recovery procedures. I also spent several days performing hardware upgrades at Telehouse Docklands in London, where I saw how most of the Internet traffic in the UK is routed between ISPs and internationally.
February 2001 to June 2001:
- Travelled across South-East Asia and Australia.
June 2000 to January 2001:
- ‘Technical Manager’ CPD On-line Plc 1345 High Road Whetstone London N20 9LD
I returned to CPD to assist the new Technical Director with the on-going development of the network and software that host their web-site. They had since become a public limited company, and as I was the one who had originally developed their systems, I was the best choice. I was mostly responsible for bringing the company source code back into a central repository, and begin to tidy and document it in preparation for being worked on concurrently by multiple developers. I was also responsible for selecting and training new developers to join the company, and for upgrading the software and hardware on their key servers to cope with the expected growth of the company over the next few years.
December 1998 to June 2000:
- ‘Network Manager’ VALE International Ltd CAS House Thames Industrial Estate Marlow Bucks SL7 1TB
I returned to VALE to become a network administrator, looking after the day-to-day running of a simple but demanding network of around 20 users. I reported to the Technical Director, and assisted him wherever possible. Again, I was the sole technical engineer, and covered a variety of tasks. My time was spent responding to all kinds of technical requests, ranging from second-level customer support, to installing and deploying new application servers.
December 1996 to November 1998:
- ‘Web Master’ CPD Ltd 75 St Margarets Avenue Whetstone London N20 9LD
CPD is a company that sells access to a web-based commercial property database for estate agents across the UK. They also provide email and web services to their customers, and re-sell dial-up Internet access. My primary duty was to develop and support the commercial web and email services, and on-line database services, running on Linux servers. During my time there, I developed their network infrastructure, database structure and web application software, including porting their legacy Perl/CGI scripts to Java Servlets, upgrading and tuning their mySQL database, and moving their main server from a cupboard in the office connected to a 64k leased line router to a more appropriate server at a co-location facility to lower costs and provide better value-for-money. As the sole technical engineer, I covered a wide range of tasks, which strengthened my understanding of many areas of computer science. I enjoyed the challenges and the responsibility associated with running the technical side of a small company. Once the office network had been suitably configured, I worked mostly from home via an ISDN connection.
September 1994 to November 1996:
- ‘Software Developer’ VALE International Ltd CAS House Thames Industrial Estate Marlow Bucks SL7 1TB
My primary duty here involved software development and support for an international ‘Field Service Management System’ called ‘VALE’. VALE was originally developed in Pick, but later ported to UniBasic (from Unidata), so as to run on Unix variants. I was involved in fixing bugs, developing new features and writing bespoke reports to client’s requirements. My other duties included general technical support for some key international clients, and providing technical advice to the front-line support department. I was also involved in network planning, implementation, administration and management of the in-house network and assisted on-site for roll out of terminal, modem and printer solutions for our clients. I enjoyed the variety and challenge of my work, and the responsibilities of my roles.
September 1993 to June 1994
- ‘Trainee Programmer’ Partners Computer System s Ltd North Street Thame Oxfordshire
My primary duty involved software development and support for bespoke improvements to a Business Management Suite called ‘Europa’. Europa was developed in Alpha Basic on an Alpha Microsystems minicomputer platform. I assisted in new installations and site relocations. I gained certification in AMOS (Alpha Micro Operating System) system administration.
Tools and service experience 🔗
- Hosting Platforms: AWS, Azure, GCP, Vultr, Contabo, OVH, countless others.
- Network Provisioning: Kubernetes, Rancher2, Terraform, Ansible.
- Network Monitoring Tools: Datadog, Prometheus, Nagios/Icinga.
- Network Protocols: TCP/IP, BGP, VRRP, VLANs, IPSec, Wireguard, OpenVPN.
- Desktop Operating Systems: Ubuntu/Debian Linux, RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS.
- Programming Languages: Python, Golang, NodeJS, PHP, Java, C
- Query Languages: SQL, PromQL, XPath.
- Markup Languages: XML, HTML, JSON, YAML.
- Server Application Frameworks: WordPress, Odoo, Django.
- Web Client Frameworks: Angular.
- Development Tools: vi/emacs/Atom/Codium, ssh, git, Firefox/Firebug, OpenOffice, Google.