Build Engineer at BSkyB
London, United Kingdom
- Current
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- Build Engineer (contracted through The Scale Factory) at BSkyB
- Director at The Scale Factory Ltd
- Consultant Sysadmin at Songkick.com
- Past
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- Senior Systems Administrator at Trutap Ltd
- Senior Network and Systems Engineer at Legend Communications plc
- Support Manager / Software Developer at Designer Servers Ltd
- Education
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- The University of Manchester
- Recommended
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4 people have recommended Jon - Connections
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140
connections
- Industry
- Internet
- Websites
Jon Topper’s Summary
Linux systems and network specialist, with particular experience in virtualisation and scalable web applications. Strong team player, with good grasp of tools for collaborative working. Most comfortable in startup and small-business environments.
Jon Topper’s Specialties:
server architecture, software architecture, systems administration, troubleshooting, linux, perl, RedHat, scale, virtualization, collaborative working, trac, subversion, svn, kickstart
Jon Topper’s Experience
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Build Engineer (contracted through The Scale Factory)
BSkyB
(Public Company; BSY; Broadcast Media industry)
September 2009 — Present (3 months)
I'm working with a small team at Sky, developing methods for applying Continuous Integration techniques usually used only in software engineering to systems and infrastructure.
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Director
The Scale Factory Ltd
(Internet industry)
January 2009 — Present (11 months)
The Scale Factory is a small Linux consultancy, specialising in making small LAMP applications scale to a larger architecture. We have particular expertise in automated deployment, centralised administration and monitoring, load balancing, and fault tolerance. We also work heavily with virtualisation solutions and cloud computing deployments.
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Consultant Sysadmin
Songkick.com
(Internet industry)
January 2009 — Present (11 months)
Songkick aim to create the definitive live music resource - an IMDb of past concerts, along with information about up-coming gigs and a social features to connect with other live music fans.
When I first spoke to Songkick they were running the first version of their website from a couple of dedicated servers, with limited scalability and no provision for high availability. Over the next six months, we worked together to build a scalable, highly-available systems architecture using freely available tools and software, deploying it onto colocated Sun and Cisco hardware.
As well as familiar technologies such as LDAP, MySQL, Apache, Zabbix, keepalived and openvpn, this contract also gave me exposure to Ruby, MogileFS, haproxy, Solr, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ and memcached; as well as the opportunity to use puppet on a broader scale. We use VMWare ESXi extensively on both development and production hardware, with Ubuntu being the Linux flavour of choice. -
Senior Systems Administrator
Trutap Ltd
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
November 2005 — December 2008 (3 years 2 months)
Early on, responsible for:
* Design and deployment of load balanced, highly-available LAMP architecture
* Development of customer- and staff-facing web interfaces, using the Perl Catalyst framework
* Internal networking and IT
* Instigation and maintenance of company-wide software development, release engineering and bug tracking process based on Subversion and Trac
Later in the company's development, following a round of funding, I hired and ran a small systems team, whose responsibilities (in addition to the above) included:
* Design, build and support of LAMP platform for a second generation product, heavily based on VMWare ESX
* Maintaining an RPM package repository of in-house and locally-built software
* Internal networking and IT for Windows, Linux and Mac users across three locations, with support for remote workers
* Profiling for performance improvement, and platform troubleshooting -
Senior Network and Systems Engineer
Legend Communications plc
(Public Company; 51-200 employees; BRV.L; Internet industry)
August 2004 — November 2005 (1 year 4 months)
* Day-to-day running of a network of 200 servers, used by around 3,500 reseller customers covering some 117,000 domains
* Deployment of new servers in Manchester and London
* Involved in the architecture and deployment of new system solutions for integration of multiple businesses inside the Legend group onto one common platform.
* Providing training for new staff -
Support Manager / Software Developer
Designer Servers Ltd
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
June 2001 — August 2004 (3 years 3 months)
* Developed control panel software (over 20,000 lines of OO Perl, C/C++ and XSL)
* Managed team of up to 5 support engineers
Jon Topper’s Education
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The University of Manchester
1997 — 2001
Additional Information
Jon Topper’s Websites:
Jon Topper’s Groups:
British Computer Society
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Perl Mongers -
Linux Expert -
Agile System Administration
Jon Topper’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
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