James Dawson Email & Phone Number

London, England, Gb

An independent consultant helping clients evolve how they deliver software and address their DevOps challenges.

London, London, Gb

Having chosen Azure Kubernetes Service as their next-generation compute platform, the Client formed a small engineering team to develop an automated process for provisioning AKS clusters (and other required functionality) that other engineering teams could easily use.This involved working with a wide cross-section of teams (architecture, security, incident response, infrastructure, networks, support, release management etc.) to help define, implement and test the many design requirements for the new platform.In trying to fully-automate the process we often had to question existing manual processes to understand their value and then design and advocate for automated equivalents.Technologies: Azure, Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible, Python, PowerShell, Bash, Git (AzureDevOps), TeamCity, AzureDevOps, OctopusDeploy

Altrincham, Greater Manchester, Gb

Worked with the new CTO as part of an Agile adoption programme focusing on the tooling, processes and team required to help reduce the friction associated with development, test and release activities of multiple software engineering teams split across two sites and multiple products.Led the design of the new infrastructure platform and CI/CD stack that would support the desired business goals of faster time to market, improved testing and more efficient management of their hosted Clients. This included working with the wider engineering team to guide the tool selection process and with other internal teams as they managed the vendor selection activities.Helped recruit the cross-site team who would focus on the initial engineering effort for the required automation and who would work closely with the other development teams. I ran 'bootcamp' sessions for this team to introduce the new approaches, tools and processes to get them up-and-running.Later in the engagement I was able to take more of a coaching role as the team became more confident with the technologies and the principals of self-organising around the evolving business priorities.Technologies: Centos/RHEL, Chef, vSphere, Docker, Ruby, Java, Git (Bitbucket), Jenkins

London, London, Gb

Worked as part of a trial to evaluate a new compute platform and team composition for delivering machine-learning based services.The team consisted of data scientists, big data & software and platform engineers working to deliver an ML-based version of an existing recommendations service using Azure Machine Learning Services v2 (AML v2) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), both which were still in various preview states.The project served as both a means to deliver a new service into Production as well as an evaluation of AML v2 & AKS and how to make such a cross-functional team work most effectively.Technologies: Azure, Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, Python, PowerShell, Bash, Git (AzureDevOps), TeamCity, OctopusDeploy

London, London, Gb

The Client’s adoption of OctopusDeploy had grown massively and this had, in turn, led to a ballooning in the amount of configuration data held within the system. Whilst different development teams were largely autonomous there was still a need to share certain configuration data, however, a by-product of this autonomy was a high degree of duplicated configuration.This project involved designing a system to operate entirely within OctopusDeploy that could simplify the process of sharing configuration between teams whilst also ensuring that any subsequent changes could flow through to those teams relying on it.Technologies: C#, PowerShell, SpecFlow, Git (AzureDevOps), TeamCity, OctopusDeploy

London, London, Gb

Worked with the Platform Engineering team leadership to help shape the recruitment and career progression criteria in a way that would meet the current/future demands upon the team and the needs of those within it.Additionally, we looked at how data from existing systems and processes could be collected and aggregated to form useful metrics and KPIs - this work primarily utilised Elasticsearch and Kibana.

London, London, Gb

Having recently adopted TeamCity and OctopusDeploy for new systems, the Client was keen to align more of their existing release & deployment activities around this new tooling. In order to migrate the large number of ‘legacy’ components in a reasonable time, I proposed an approach whereby a thin, re-usable layer was built with the new tooling that could effectively wrap the previous deployment tooling. In this way these changes were largely transparent to the components being migrated and offered a flexible migration timetable.Technologies: Windows, PowerShell, C#, TFS, Git, TeamCity, OctopusDeploy

London, London, Gb

Worked with and supported the team responsible for migrating from TFS 2010 to TFS 2013.Technologies: Windows, PowerShell, C#, MSBuild, TFS

London, London, Gb

Led a team that re-engineered the build, configuration management, deployment and release process for the platform that underpinned the Client's web site and evolved it alongside a major re-structuring of the engineering function, an architectural transition to micro-services. Also helped the team leadership to grow the team and ensure knowledge transfer. Technologies: Windows, PowerShell, C#, MSBuild, TFS

London, England, Gb

Working as an Endjin associate with a team helping the Client develop a new SaaS-based payroll offering, building on the success of their existing thick-client solution.This involved building a suitable continuous integration platform, migrating to a modern version control system (GitHub) and developing automated processes for deployment/configuration of the application and database components.Also worked with the Client’s existing developer to ensure they understood the benefits of adopting the new tools & processes as well as enabling their ownership of them going forward.

London, London, Gb

As their web site development team moved to an agile methodology their existing software delivery tooling became a constraint and was impairing their ability release site changes. Working as an Endjin Associate I helped them make better use of their existing investment in Team Foundation Server and developed automated build/deployment and configuration management tooling to address the above challenges, enabling deployment packages to be built once and be deployable to all environments from Development all the way through to Production.In particular, automating the integration of the ASP.NET web site with the multi-language content produced via the Tridion CMS was especially challenging.Key technologies: MSBuild, PowerShell, WiX, TFS

London, Gb

London, Greater London, Gb

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