# drewsonne.bsky.social (@drewsonne.bsky.social)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/drewsonne.bsky.social
Headline: SRE

## About

I believe in mentoring members of my team more than leading them. If I can present them with situations where they come out better developers or knowing more about the system, then I'm doing my job.

I believe evidence, and a happy team make good software. I've driven across 4 continents on some of the most dangerous roads, across some of the largest deserts, and up some of the highest peaks in the world.

When teams love their product and find pride in their work, it makes software and services that everybody wants to use (and buy!).

When incentives are aligned to what teams want, and not what management thinks they want (money doesn't incentivise everyone!), then they *do* love their products and they *do* take great pride in them. When teams own product and services; when they are personally invested in their success; when everybody is on the same team and their goals are aligned, great things can be done.

## Career

- **SRE at Bloomberg L.P.** (Jul 2024 - Present)
  City Of London, England, GB
- **Engineering Manager at J Sainsbury** (Oct 2022 - Jun 2024)
  Greater London, England, GB
- **Head of Data at Wegift** (May 2022 - Sep 2022)
- **Co-Founder at presentient technologies Ltd** (Apr 2021 - Mar 2022)
  I spent a year starting my own company, building a product to help de-silo the healthcare industry. I was responsible for fundraising, writing roadmaps, leading all the development for data ingestion,  backend (python/openapi), and front end (Typescript).
- **Data Engineering Manager at J Sainsbury** (Apr 2020 - Apr 2021)
  London
  I lead a team responsible for the financial records for the whole company. I had to coordinate with other managers to handle the integration of Tui, Argos, and Habitat data into the existing Sainsburys Data Warehouse. My line responsibilities included 8 developers, and mentoring engineers.
- **Data Engineering Manager at Blis** (Oct 2018 - Apr 2020)
  London, GB
  Lead a team of 5 responsible for the ingestion of location based adtech data and the refactoring of the entire GIS data processing pipeline. This involved the design of a data warehouse  of an active 4Pb dataset with 7Tb per day incoming for downstream analysis, and real time decision making. I was tasked with migrating from AWS to GCP with an ends to reduce op-ex, which was achieved with no downtime, and led to a 10% reduction in monthly spend. Lead, designed, and implemented in conjunction with my team, a successful migration away from Cassandra to Scylla with again, no downtime.
- **Principal Technical Consultant at Contino** (Jul 2018 - Oct 2018)
  My time at Contio involved designing and deploying a configuration management system to simplify client installation of client products. This involved Chef, Apache Storm, Bash, and deployment of custom java applications for real time financial fraud detection systems.
- **Engineering Manager/Head of Data Platform at beamly SA** (Oct 2017 - Jul 2018)
  London, GB
  I was promoted and  lead a team who re-developed the data platform for all the companies ad tick data. This involved a platform based on the lambda architecture system, built on spark and AWS Athena. I was responsible for line management of a team of 5 and liaising with analytics teams, and data science teams.
- **Senior System Engineer at beamly SA** (Apr 2017 - Oct 2017)
  London, GB
  I was directly responsible for implementing a stable, modular, easy-to-use, implementation of our architecture in terraform. As well as designing and driving a refactoring of our AWS account structure to improve security, and compliance. I worked with project managers, product owners, and external agencies on a regular basis, building good rapport, thereby reducing friction between internal and external stakeholders.
- **Senior Cloud Architect at Nordcloud** (Apr 2015 - Apr 2017)
  London, GB
  As a cloud focused Solution Architect, I helped a myriad of companies with diverse requirements and roadmaps to either migrate from their old-world physical infrastructure or to optimise their platforms to improve performance, functionality, and reduce cost.
- **Senior IT DevOps Engineer at Blinkbox** (Aug 2014 - Apr 2015)
  During my short time at blinkbox Books, I was responsible for investigating and implementing an elastic scaling solution (quickly provisioning VMs) for our products. I wrote puppet manifests from scratch specific to our in-house architecture for redis, solr, postgres, and elasticsearch. I was also the primary technical contact for Microsoft Azure within the books company, working along with Azure representatives from Microsoft in pre-release programs helping provide real world feedback and alpha testing for their new deployment tools.
  
  When investigating problems in our products, my background and continuing skills in Software Development allowed me to bridge the Ops and Dev domain to help isolate and identify the cause of problems and provide solutions.
  
  I was also an evangelist for encouraging Development and Operations teams to work closer together, and sat with Developers on many occasions to dissemination information, reduce domain knowledge within the Ops team and encourage Developers to take Ops concerns into account while working on their products.
- **DevOps Engineer at Australian Broadcasting Corporation** (Aug 2013 - Aug 2014)
  I'm responsible for the stable operation of MySQL, Nginx/PHP-FPM servers for ABC's flagship VOD service, iView. I'm also the prime mover in building automated deployment systems for the ABC's kids assets, Club3 and ABC4Kids.
  
  In my time here I:
  \- helped migrate the iview platform from the US to Australia.
  
  I've also introduced load testing, and log aggregation products.
- **Team Lead at Viocorp** (Sep 2012 - Jun 2013)
  Pyrmont
  Viocorp is a major player in the Australian corporate Video Management market. Their two keystone products are Viostream, a video delivery platform, and Viomedia, a Video Management System of which I was personally responsible for, on both an ongoing and day-to-day basis.
  
  My responsibilities included managing my team of 3 developers, as well as the extensive legacy requirements for Viomedia and their related of support items. During my tenture, I have overseen, designed, and guided 3 separate projects:  A recurring payment mechanism, involving two main challenges: a practically non-existent documentation base and multiple architectures in the Viomedia product; and extensive system integration with Infinitium and PayPal. I audited large portions of the product and produced documentation on the method, class, and architecture level. A third project, currently being undertaken, saw me: taking on the position of Sales Engineer attending meetings and working with the client to find a balance between existing functionality and extending the system to meet the clients needs; working closely with the technical writer and product manager to expand the functionality specification. This project hopes to implement Viomedia in both function and scale to Netflix.
  
  As two of the developers in my team were Juniors, I undertook code reviews, and one-on-one discussion sessions, talking about the pros and cons of their choice of design decisions. I believe in placing trust in my team members based on their strengths, delegating tasks accordingly. It would not have been possible for me to undertake all 3 projects at once without the help of my team, and for this reason, I could not micro-manage.
- **Snr Developer at Viocorp** (May 2012 - Sep 2012)
  Between BAU and bug fixes, I wrote functional and technical specifications for new large and medium features, as well as began the process of stream lining our deployment processes by writing shell scripts, which would later become puppet scripts.
- **Developer at Brighton Consulting** (Nov 2011 - May 2012)
  I was responsible for building a DNS record management system for the websites for 30+ clients of the company, as well as part of a team of 4 responsible for weekly security audits presented to the company directors each week, outlining attacks on the systems.
- **Developer at Net Ventures** (Jan 2010 - Oct 2011)
  I was responsible for maintaining and implementing new features for the company's Video Management System SOAP interface. During my time, I brought response times for this SOAP service down from on average 4 seconds per record to 0.2 seconds per record, despite a two fold increase in traffic, and no hardware upgrades.
  
  I was also responsible for construction of a system to provide systems integration with thePlatform's MPS.
- **Junior Programmer at Net Ventures** (Sep 2009 - Feb 2011)
  I have developed Web 2.0 Applications using the Ext3 framework, as well as maintaining and implementing new features for a SOAP media ingestion system. I was also responsible for construction of a synchronisation system with thePlatform.
- **Salesperson at Telstra** (Nov 2008 - Jul 2009)
  Sales, Face-to-face Technical Support provided directly to the public.

## Skills

### Other
- Agile Methodologies
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Bash
- Bash Scripting
- Big Data
- Big Data Analytics
- Chef
- Cloud Computing
- CSS
- Databases
- DataVault 2.0
- Docker Products
- Dog Walking
- ExtJS
- Git
- Go
- GoCD
- HAProxy
- HTML
- Infrastructure
- JavaScript
- jQuery
- JSON
- Linux
- Linux System Administration
- Microservices
- MongoDB
- MySQL
- Nginx
- OOP
- Programming
- Project Management
- Puppet
- Python
- RHEL
- SELinux
- Shell Scripting
- Software Design
- Software Development
- Software Engineering
- SQL
- Team Leadership
- Terraform
- TypeScript
- Web Development
- Web Scale
- XML

## Projects

- **Colonial Massacres Analysis** — https://github.com/drewsonne/aus-colonial-massacres/blob/main/analyses.ipynb (Jan 2022 - Present)
  A small weekend project to provide some visualisations in the volume and participants in massacres in Colonial Australia
- **go-gocd** — https://github.com/beamly/go-gocd (Jul 2017 - Present)
  Golang SDK for Thoughtworks GoCD CI server.
- **ForEach Custom AWS Cloudformation Resource** — https://github.com/drewsonne/lambda-cfn-fneach (Aug 2016 - Present)
  An AWS Cloudformation Lambda backed Custom resource to allow you to iterate an array and inject each element into a string pattern
- **Helper library providing password generator, and ArgumentParser and Credentials handler for AWS authentication** — https://github.com/drewsonne/awsauthhelper (Apr 2016 - Present)
  Helper python library providing ArgumentParser and Credentials class for AWS authentication.
- **FuelPHP Mongo Session Driver** — https://github.com/drewsonne/fuelphp-mongosession (Nov 2013 - Present)
  I took an existing skeleton fuel-php session driver, and added mongodb as a data source for read, writing, and deleting sessions to a MongoDB.
- **Marvin v2** (Oct 2014 - Jan 2015)
  Improved version of the blinkbox Books Content Management system, Marvin, which handles end-to-end ingestion and distribution of eBooks for sale.
- **yum2s3** — https://github.com/drewsonne/yum2s3
- **AWS RDS Manager** — https://github.com/nordcloud/aws-rds-manager
  Provides utilities for the management of RDS snapshots

## Credentials

- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (SAP) — Amazon Web Services (Oct 2017) https://aw.certmetrics.com/amazon/public/verification.aspx
- Intermediate R — DataCamp (Jul 2015) https://www.datacamp.com/courses/intermediate-r?utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=Certificate&utm_content=Certificate&utm_campaign=Linkedin-Certificate
- AWS Certified Developer - Associate — Amazon Web Services http://aws.amazon.com/certification/
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate — Amazon Web Services http://aws.amazon.com/certification/
- AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate — Amazon Web Services http://aws.amazon.com/certification/

## Courses

- Mathematical Cryptogaphy
- Embedded Systems
- German History, 1870 - 1938

## Involvement

### Volunteering
- PHP London (Feb 2015)
  Conference Team Member

## Languages

- French
- German

## Links

- linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewsonne