Maidsafe New Team Member: Chris O’Neil
Hi all, first of all, I’d like to thank everyone for the warm welcome I’ve received so far. I’m already thrilled to be a part of what you’re building here, and I can’t wait to get stuck in and really make a difference to an exciting, growing company!
My name is Chris O’Neil and I’m based in the Glasgow area. I’ve been in the software industry now for over 11 years, and have been brought on board to work under Stephen as a DevOps Engineer.
I spent the first 7 years of my career as a developer, mainly in web-based distributed systems targeting the AWS cloud. My interest has mainly been in back end technology rather than the front end and UX area. The majority of those 7 years were spent in the Microsoft world, namely .NET C#. Even in my development work, on many projects I additionally always seemed to end up being the ‘build person’, so I had a big interest in continuous integration and the surrounding infrastructure. Toward the end of that 7 year period, we were exploring deploying some parts of our application stack to Linux, and that’s when I began moving toward the DevOps space.
I moved to another company who had made a name for themselves with a search-based product, and I was placed in the build and release team. The back end for the product was written in Java and C, and all deployed on Linux. At this point I started to get into Linux-based automation, and what really got me hooked on DevOps was using Vagrant to provide the developers working on the client for the product with an automated back end stack they could develop against. I was also involved in producing a completely new build and release system for that product, that we automated using Puppet.
I continued my journey in the Linux world by moving to a large consultancy company who brought me in to a new centre that was primarily concerned with providing services made with open source solutions. I worked there for a year with the title ‘Open Source Developer’, but they were mainly interested in my passion for DevOps. Right from the start I helped establish the build and release infrastructure for the centre, and after about a year I became the manager of the centre’s DevOps service, so I also have some experience with management and recruitment.
After working there for a few years I worked for another consultancy company who contracted me out to the Student Loans Company, where I also worked on various projects providing build and CI/CD infrastructure for legacy projects the company wanted to move to use modern release processes.
Coming into Maidsafe, I’m really looking forward to seeing where I can make an impact to help Stephen and the rest of the organisation achieve the business objectives over the next year and beyond. I look forward to working with everyone!
