Curriculum Vitae

Alexander Clouter B.Sc. (Hons.)

4 Folly Lane, Hingham, Norfolk, NR9 4JE, United Kingdom

alex@coremem.com • +44.7944819791 • https://coremem.com/

current CV [markdown] [pdf] [docx] • LinkedIn

GitLab (work) • GitHub (work)

Date of Birth: 29th November 1980

Personal Statement

Over twenty years I accumulated the technical and management experience to build, maintain and evolve highly available services at scale, while not having the budget of the global giants. Though I can build out these services myself, I prefer to teach others the skills to do this and avoid the pitfalls I know too well.

Though my background is system and network administration, I am a polyglot in programming languages, learning others as and when the problem space demands it. I am comfortable regularly rolling up my sleeves to strace, tcpdump, reading source code and committing changes that go on to make everyone’s lives better.

The commercials fascinate me as much as the technicalities of new product development, prototyping, building a minimum viable product and its delivery to market, as well as adapting existing services so that they scale. I believe it is crucial that an organisation is able to iterate through this with ease and speed so that the good ideas are identified and grown upon and resources are not squandered on dead ends.

I am acutely aware that of the challenges in bringing a service to market, the software and infrastructure components make up only a minor part. Problems in the market require questioning, evaluation and understanding to have a chance of being able to produce a product that addresses those needs. Clients occasionally have answers or clues to what a solution might look like, though for the purposes of consultancy what is most valuable is their description of the problem space and how, if at all, they address it. Consultancy is a process that should make yourself valuable to the client.

This is how I think about problems and their solutions. I enjoy solving problems, I want to understand and solve yours.

Experience

Managerial

Technical

Education and Qualifications

2007 SANS GIAC Certified Incident Handler (GCIH)
Exam 1 - 100.00%, Exam 2 - 94.67%
1999-2002 Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London
B.Sc. Physics (Honours)
1999 Royal College of Music - Theory Grade Five
1997-1999 Paston College, The Lawns, North Walsham
GCE A-Level Physics: A
GCE A-Level Chemistry: A
GCE A-Level Mathematics: B
GCSE German: B

Employment

currently coreMem Limited
Director
Clients including Ad Tech, FTSE AIM 50, NetworkRADIUS and Universities
Business and product development
Software, infrastructure and systems consultancy
Assist with hiring and interviewing of operations and developer staff
2011-2016 Telemetry Ltd, London
Head of Infrastructure
Ran teams of between three and ten as well as hiring and training
Worked with a $500k annual budget
Reduced development cycles from weeks to hours
Primary investigator for fraud, detection, investigation and reporting through media outlets
Rapid prototyping, MVP development and product delivery to market
Handled auditing processes that led to MRC accreditation
Reduced downtime, lowered maintenance and increased system autonomy in responding to failures
2005-2011 SOAS, University of London
Infrastructure Support Analyst
full production IPv6 and multicast roll-out
discover, assess and resolve single points of failure
upgrade network infrastructure from L2 to L3 topology
maintain multicast IPTV service, portal and custom SAP proxy
cost analysis of PBX options over a five year period
deploy Tandberg video conferencing service and QA testing
automated the migration of 1000 user accounts from Netware to Google for Education
documentation for end-users (main website) and colleagues
2003-2005 Parbin Ltd - MetroNet, London
Network Support Analyst
2002-2003 Granada Media Group - Anglia Television, Norwich
Junior IT Support Analyst

coreMem Limited, Director

Since choosing self employment, I have been fortunate to retain a diverse set of clients each with their own needs and challenges. This has also enabled me to pursue product development.

Notable Projects

Working as an Employee

Telemetry Ltd, London

When I joined Telemetry, the infrastructure team maintained an environment that resembled a continuous raging fire, not helped by the code drops from developers accompanied with minimal support or explanation. ‘On call’ entailed a seven day marathon of not sleeping with an ingrained expectation to still show up for a nine till six work day. The group was demoralised and exhausted.

I taught the group how to evolve our stack to make everyone’s lives better. With their access to servers and source code they could make those necessary improvements themselves. Working with the developers we improved their design decisions and the programming skills of my system administration team. With that skill set overlap, developers and infrastructure members started working together more effectively and pro-actively sought advice from one another.

During my time there I changed the responsibilities of the team to include assisting others in their work and building fast and dirty prototypes to get projects back on track. We were described as ‘working magic’.

As well as maintaining a $500k budget and handling contract negotiations with providers I built new products to test in the market; TLM, SiteDNA and Plan Blue which made its first $1m within six months.

I was Telemetry’s primary investigator for fraud, handling the discovery, identification, filtration and working with journalists at the Financial Times, Businessweek, Ad Exchanger and Advertising Age to put together articles about my work; work that directly led to winning new business.

Projects

School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London

I was hired by SOAS to form a two person infrastructure team that would maintain the Cisco based network infrastructure and the handful of Linux systems it had deployed.

Shortly after I joined, SOAS embarked on an infrastructure refresh programme to migrate to a ‘L3 to the edge’ and 802.1X capable wired network that included the roll out of an eduroam wireless service. Working with my line manager and a colleague, we did the initial design, configuration templates, tendering for a supplier and then forklift upgrade of the Cisco switching fabric. The network had since continued to meet our needs as our requirements for quick fail over, higher throughput, multicast and production IPv6 deployment have grown.

Whilst there, and due to my involvements with eduroam, 802.1X and FreeRADIUS I was invited to be a member of the JANET Campus Networking Special Interest Group (DOT1XSIG) and in the past helped as an adviser for the JANET Wireless Technology Advisory Service (WTAS).

Projects and Presentations

Parbin Ltd - MetroNet, Harrow

Working for Parbin Ltd exposed me for the first time to networking. Originally I had been employed for frontline helpdesk work however the role quickly evolved into third line support, training and project work too. The company had several core services, a standard ISP focusing on ADSL services and three specialist sister products, email server outsourcing, web hosting and a fully client controlled domain nameserver hosting, all of which I was to learn and provide support for.

Projects

Granada Plc, Norwich

My time at the Granada involved me in the deploying and testing phases of software suitability for both the main offices and the satellite offices in addition to my regular duties as a member of the support staff in keeping things running smoothly. Promptness in problem resolving was common in a newsroom environment due to live bulletins being shown every two to three hours, a computer outage had to be resolved well before the next bulletin.