Ben Metcalfe Email & Phone Number

Upgraded and tuned a fleet of Oracle Enterprise databases in a BMC Remedy stack. As a Database Consultant for Net Consulting Ltd. I upgraded a multi-environment stack of Oracle Enterprise databases and Tomcat application servers over an 18 month period. Multiple Dev, UAT and Production environments had aged far beyond supportability and drifted way out of sync. To bring them back into a state where original vendor support would be possible and make them useful again, multi-step major version upgrades were required with an open-minded approach to the UNIX-based stacks. I took full ownership of the database systems throughout the upgrade period, tuned dev and prod systems, designed the backup and DR strategies and implemented multi-site Data Guard resilience. Additionally I had a hand in development integration, DR scenario planning and testing, network troubleshooting, best-practice promotion, process validation and knowledge transfer. I worked in tandem with skilled teams of NCL application-layer specialists and had the pleasure of providing support at all levels of the stack, from the OSs to the UI, both to NCL colleagues and the Enterprise client’s in-house team. I often took ownership of problems well beyond the original project scope when necessary. Wherever possible, I built lasting bridges with the client and their teams.Performing database / back-end migration, upgrade and integration of BMC products. DBs including Oracle (main emphasis), SQL server and PostgreSQL in highly sensitive environments. Also performing full-stack troubleshooting and optimisation. Working in association with stakeholders up to board level.

Bristol, England, United Kingdom

Iterated user analysis & dev creating a booking & membership system via google APIsFishermen and water bailiffs tend to be tech-naive and often out of broadband’s reach. For this niche user base we designed an online booking, membership and riverside verification system enabling pre-booking of a fishing spot via a sufficiently unique (simply writable or printable) code, verifiable by a water bailiff’s nearline app at the water’s edge. Using the google API to share data allows cross-platform, granular security and externalises mobile app development entirely. Result: Huge admin / dev time savings and revenue that remains viable during lockdown - allowing the club to welcome members from several neighboring organisations during the pandemic and market itself as a field leader. It’s now the largest in the UK.Arts community support during pandemic lockdownI’ve been working with Take Art Ltd (an umbrella organisation for the arts in Somerset) for several years on various projects. The most recent challenge was moving their LAN data into the cloud to make home working viable. This freed up an overworked VPN while leaving the LAN data store useful, a tradeoff between limited bandwidth and acceptable sync / backup latency. Result: Take Art is thriving and coping well with lockdown.

Rescued a businesses' online infrastructureHired by a panicking comedy impresario to rescue her business from an unresponsive hosting company, I salvaged content from existing, outdated servers without sysops, backups or physical access. After a great deal of page scraping and cleansing I pulled the entire 40k user-base into an AWS phpList system. The antique Umbraco MVC / .NET Razor / IIS / SQL server web site was similarly scraped and updated onto AWS, keeping the original styling intact at the client’s request. Result: The main business - comedy clubs and stand-up training - thrived and grew and has survived lockdown.Reimplemented a bankrupt company group’s IT operationReporting to the Ops Director, I tech-PM’d a team migrating AD and line-of-business apps in the tight time-frame of a rescue buyout. At stake: Three hundred core jobs and SLAs with the MOD, Education and the NHS. I synchronised a UK-wide grouping of consultants, suppliers, and ops both from the old group’s IT and the new outsourced data-centre. Simultaneously my own team P-to-V’d and reverse-engineered legacy .NET and Java / Oracle code to make it supportable and replaced branch-office AD on ageing servers in all eleven companies with a Hyper-V-based, centralised and scalable platform on clustered Server 2008 in a private cloud.Result: We ensured SLAs remained unbroken and contractual penalties were avoided. Co-managed infrastructure upgrade and UK-wide branch refitI tech PM’d with several teams across the UK, designing and delivering gold-builds and updated software for key sites nation-wide. Result: Hitting the deadlines assured KPIs stayed in the green and fierce non-completion penalties were avoided.

London

Resurrected an AD / Exchange system and continued as L.O.B. sysadminCalled in to repair and redesign an ailing AD / Exchange / Blackberry system in SMIF’s Clerkenwell head office. I built a strong relationship with the senior linux sysadmin & intranet coder (Tomasz Kotarba, personal reference below). After the initial emergency, I worked with Tomasz and the ops team to ensure SMIF’s Windows and Linux systems meshed harmoniously. I administered SMIF’s AD & messaging until the company was absorbed into a larger group.

Spanning the dot-com bubble and shifting from ASP on NT and PHP on Slackware to Coldfusion and Java on IIS and Redhat/Tomcat. We worked on some great sites.Memorably; Volkswagen's official commercial vehicles site (I still love T-series vans), the Welsh National Opera and Cardiff Airport's embryonic Live Flight Information System, an early almost-XML update service from airport to website that was quite revolutionary for its day.

Transformed expert system into a friendlier, maintainable knowledge baseMy team turned the semi-official Back Office expert system - PHP 3 and flat-files on a Slackware server created in the team’s spare time - into a working, "Invented Here" ASP / SQL Server intranet application. The system was a success and the quality of our support offering improved as a result.

Wales

Developed software installations for a 100,000-strong user base while solving client tech issues, created an expert system to preserve and spread previously-siloed expertiseGrowing from 3rd Line tech support / Postmaster / Hostmaster for Cabletel South Wales' mail servers and RADIUS systems, my role soon included team lead for the new Back Office. With a broad remit we iterated naive-user-proof customer software upgrades (preventing IE4 eating 100,000 systems as we rolled it out), while developing an intranet expert system to capture and disseminate the knowledge our teams gained from solved tech issues.