Nicola Worthington

Current

• Director at TFB Technology Ltd
• Senior Infrastructure Engineer at McAfee International Ltd

Past

• Consultant at SC2 Technology Ltd
• Internet Operations Unix Engineer at BBC Technology
• Software Engineer at BBC Interactive Factual & Learning

• Network Operations Engineer at Frontier Internet Services Ltd
• Software Engineer at Optio Software UK Ltd
• Software Integration Engineer at Interactive (UK) Ltd

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Recommended

12 people have recommended Nicola

Connections

121 connections

Industry

Computer & Network Security

Websites

• My Curriculum Vitae
• My Company
• Other

Nicola Worthington’s Summary

I am an experienced Linux system administrator (RHCE, VCP) and Perl programmer, working in the ISP and software development industries. I enjoy writing Perl software, much of which I have released publicly as open source software on CPAN. PSMON and RRD::Simple are used by system administrators around the world. I am also currently a silent director of TFB Technology Ltd.

I am a highly motivated individual and pride myself on completing tasks to the highest possible standard the first time around. As such I find designing, planning and improving networks and other systems' infrastructure very rewarding, and is an area that I would like to continue to work in and develop. I am specifically interested in continuing my career in LAMP System Administration and monitoring (in or out of a NOC environment), and related areas.

I prefer to work within 1 hour's drive of Watford outside the North Circular / A406, or close to London Euston.

Nicola Worthington’s Specialties:

Perl and Linux expert. Extensive experience with Apache (1.x and 2.x), mod_perl, Nagios and RRD. Have designed, implemented and deployed large RHEL systems in enterprise environments.

Nicola Worthington’s Experience

• Director

  TFB Technology Ltd

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

  June 2007 — Present (1 year 3 months)

  http://www.tfb.net

• Senior Infrastructure Engineer

  McAfee International Ltd

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; MFE; Computer & Network Security industry)

  2006 — Present (2 years)

  The AVERT (Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team) division of McAfee is the core of McAfee's product development and back-office service delivery. I worked on all back-end services and infrastructure in the ASE (Anti-Spam Engineering) team within AVERT. I implemented and maintain comprehensive monitoring of the ASE & AVERT infrastructure (>500 hosts, >2000 services) using Nagios and a custom installation of my open source RRD monitoring software. For my RRD software, see rrd.me.uk & RRD::Simple. I am currently migrating to scalable distributed Nagios configuration to allow monitoring of more hosts and services throughout the company, worldwide. I have worked continuously to consolidate and improve the building, installation and continuing maintenance of servers and services within the AVERT organisation. I have done this, where possible, through standardisation of hardware and automated unattended OS installations using PXE network boot servers and Kickstart with RHEL & CentOS.

• Consultant

  SC2 Technology Ltd

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

  2004 — June 2007 (3 years)

  http://www.sc2tech.com

• Internet Operations Unix Engineer

  BBC Technology

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Broadcast Media industry)

  2005 — 2006 (1 year)

  BBCT (now SIS/Siemens IT Solutions & Services) provide and manage the BBC's online internet presence. I worked in a team of nine UNIX engineers who managed a large farm of Solaris Apache web servers, mod_perl application servers and Real streaming servers at multiple locations throughout the UK and US. These provide all dynamic and streaming content to www.bbc.co.uk and news.bbc.co.uk. My primary responsibilities were managing the core mod_perl application server farm and their hosted Perl applications. This included auditing Perl code before installing it in the live production environment, to ensure that the code was secure, efficient, and would not adversely effect the smooth operation of the mod_perl server pool. Other projects I managed include the migration of mod_perl instances from legacy Perl 5.004 and 5.6.1 installs to Perl 5.8.7, and development and implementation of automated mod_perl server performance monitoring and analysis tools.

• Software Engineer

  BBC Interactive Factual & Learning

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; BBC; Broadcast Media industry)

  2004 — 2005 (1 year)

  Working within a team of six other software engineers responsible for maintaining the CMS and development servers (Linux, Windows and Solaris), developing new Perl applications and reusable development tools for the department, webmasters, technical project managers and client-side developers. Primary technologies were Perl, Apache, mod_perl, MySQL and Oracle 8 and 9. Examples of iF&Ls work were the integration of interactive technologies for "Test The Nation" and "The Big Challenge".

• Network Operations Engineer

  Frontier Internet Services Ltd

  (Internet industry)

  2001 — 2004 (3 years)

  I worked in the core NOC team in London Docklands, managing and maintaining all aspects of core servers, services and network infrastructure. We exclusively used Linux on our servers, which helped me develop strong Linux administration skills. I also learned to configure Lucent/Ascend NAS (Network Access Server) hardware and Cisco 1600 & 3600 series routers. My Cisco router knowledge played an essential role during configuration of leased line installations while visiting customer offices. During my time at Frontier I developed an appreciation of the Exim MTA and MySQL, and how to integrate them in to highly flexible and performant mail routing and delivery farm. Other responsibilities included server provisioning (from building server hardware, to installing and configuring both operating systems and hosted applications and services), CGI application development, ad-hoc systems automation programming in Perl + shell scripting, and 24 hour out of hours on-call for network emergencies.

• Software Engineer

  Optio Software UK Ltd

  (Public Company; 51-200 employees; OPTO; Computer Software industry)

  2000 — 2001 (1 year)

  I worked in a small team for UK and EU operations (four in the UK, ten in France), primarily focused on customer specified programming rojects. My responsibilities included managing projects from initial concept to installation, programming, through to final user acceptance testing, documentation and project completion. Also included training customers OptioDCS DCL programming language and general product support for all Optio Software products. I was frequent required to visit customer sites throughout the UK and Europe which required a high degree of profressionalism and self-confidence. My last major projects inclued writing DCL code for Dell EMEA and HJ Heinz including invoicing, statements and order acknowledgments. Troubleshooting and integration with various host UNIX and Windows operating systems and often unfamiliar customer software installations was an integral part of my duties, which required good analytical skills and the ability to quickly adapt and learn on the job.

• Software Integration Engineer

  Interactive (UK) Ltd

  (Public Company; 201-500 employees; EPIC; Computer Software industry)

  1996 — 2000 (4 years)

  Responsibilities included on-site installation and integration of third party products in to the Avanté ERP database. Including custom development, sales demonstrations and training with COGNOS ODBC, Smart Forecasting, BACSTEL, UniData RDBMS, OptioDCS and OptioFAX. I gained experience with many flavours of UNIX during this time, including HPUX, AIX, DG-UX, SCO, Solaris and Linux.

Additional Information

Nicola Worthington’s Websites:

• My Curriculum Vitae
• My Company
• Other

Nicola Worthington’s Interests:

I have a keen interest in British and American politics, and international current affairs. I enjoy amateur photography, watching international tennis events and am a regular BBC Radio 4 listener. In my spare time I write and release open source Perl software, am an active member of CPAN, and have been a member of the Free Software Foundation since 2004.

Nicola Worthington’s Groups:

Free Software Foundation Associate Member since 2004

•    International Association of Software Architects
•    IT Specialist
•    Perl Mongers
•    CPAN Developers
•    The UNIX Forums Users
•    Linux Expert
•    Linux in Business
•    VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
•    Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCE)
•    MySQL Professionals
•    Datacenterlink
•    Advanced Perl Users (JAPH)
•    Nominet Community
•    McAfee Professionals
•    Nagios Users

Nicola Worthington’s Honors:

Feb/2008 - VCP310 / VMware Certified Professional on VI3 (VCP #22953)
Feb/2008 - TVD-901-LVW / Live Virus Workshop (2 day)
Jan/2008 - VMware Infrastructure 3: Fast Track Program (5 day extended hours)
Dec/2006 - MySQL 5 Cluster for High Availability (3 day)
Feb/2006 - RedHat Certified Engineer (100% exam pass mark)
Apr/2005 - ITIL foundation course (1 day)
Nov/2004 - Learning Tree Course 590, Oracle9i: A Comprehensive Hands-On Introduction (5 day)

Nicola Worthington’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• reference requests
• getting back in touch