Rebel Astronaut

Co-Founder

Featurespace

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

DOPS  DIGITAL

Consulting as the Director of the DXOne program for the London Stock Exchange Group.

- Delivered a Developer Platform (DXOne) that would provide a single experience across the whole Org (12k technologists).
- Ran a program with ~50 engineers, architects and BAs.
- DXOne was the first program to successfully deliver their transformation objectives on time, since the merger with Refinitiv.
- Reduced time from idea to market on average by 67% for Lines of Business.
- Delivered an analytics platform to ensure CIOs and their reports get visibility on their areas.
- Designed and Implemented a new operating model to break down the flow of work across teams.
- Designed a community engagement model that was elevated to become the standard for all developer focused comms.
- Liased with Regulators to ensure that changes were approved to the same level as nuclear power plants. 
- Presented and sold the vision of DXOne to numerous CIOs, Heads of Department and Developers.

Principal Transformation Consultant

- Won the company wide ‘Raising the Bar’ award for innovation. 
- Designed and implemented new operating model in a department of 150 employees, driving a more product focused approach.
- Implemented Agile processes in 5 teams to increase velocity by over 100%.
- Owned and implemented the roadmap for IG’s new platform, based on kubernetes.
- Increased resilience for platform by 50% through repeated testing and iteration.
- Designed engagement model for onboarding new teams to the platform.
- Evangelised new platform and created excitement and momentum around the initiative.

Technical Architect - Platform

Contino

- Provided security assurance for FTSE 250  enterprise.
- Enabled Transformation to go live with a goal to double profit within 2 years.
- Developed a “Security First” Culture within the org. 
- Built in-house security team and empowered them to set their own agenda.
- Compiled a report of recomendations for the C-Suite to empower their transformation.
- Developed the consultancy’s internal security practices.

Principal Consultant

Pearson

- Designed and built a platform to support 600+ developers
- Leading architectural decision making and being the voice of security within the team.
- Leading a team of 20 DevOps engineers, training where needed and ensuring the team’s
velocity steadily improved.
- Decreased application onboarding from 3 months to 1 week.
- Decreased overhead for application teams reducing or removing non business workloads to
enable them to decrease cycle time.
- Designed and deployed an automated detection and remediation system within all Pearson AWS
accounts (~200) reducing risks by up to 80%.
- Worked with stakeholders to define account strategy for whole of Pearson.
- Implemented regular vulnerability scanning and remediation for both containers and AMI’s.
- Spearheaded migration to improved CI infrastructure, reducing run times by over 50% and
increasing stability by 30%.
- Implemented Incident response and reporting precedure and ran weekly drills, resolving
incidents 50% faster than before implemented.
- Redesigned kubernetes control plane to support multi-master and regular deploys.
- Responsible for defining and creating a contract between DevOps teams and application teams
to be able to deliver 99.999% uptime to their applications and reduce friction between teams.
- Decreased cost by 200% within development environments, by utilising automated cleanup,
elastic scaling and simplifying the architecture.

DevSecOps Lead/Architect

UK Home Office

- Leading a team of 20 within to deliver a platform supporting 300+ developers.
- Working within highly secure environment empowering critical national infrastructure.
- Implement Vault/Consul workflow for secrets and certificate management.
- Design/Implement the ability update AMI’s without data loss or downtime.
- Standardise engineering practices to increase stability across the whole environment.
- Educate security teams around the differences between cloud infrastructure and on prem.
- Work with team leads to promote containerisation within the team.
- Built out splunk for security monitoring of environments.

Lead Devops/Security Consultant

PhotoBox

- Responsible for taking a dysfunctional team with no leader and low velocity, motivating them,
clarified working procedure and increased velocity by over 100%.
- Designed new kubernetes cluster based around kops for Photobox to migrate all legacy systems
onto.
- Began work on constructing full feature monitoring and security systems.
- Worked closely with the SOC team to manage the security risks and implementing fixes,
including basic secrets management system, and cloudformation creation pipeline.
- Worked with development teams to enable them to manage their own pipelines securely within
Jenkins framework.
- Took stability from 60% uptime in the first month, over all environments, to 100% uptime in the
last.
- Liased with development leads and managers, to ensure that all goals were aligned.
- Implemented agile, to ensure that the workload was measurable, and changes were data-
driven.
- Descreased cycle time by over 40% development teams, allowing features to get shipped faster
and more frequently.

Lead Devops Consultant

- Built and Managed multiple kubernetes clusters as PAAS’ for all Home Office Digital Projects, ie.
- Consulted on the migration of highly sensitive projects onto kubernetes.
- Audited projects on security and worked with apps that were deemed vulnerable to remediate
those threats.
- Built and managed monitoring platform based on Sysdig running on premise on kubernetes and
monitoring over 200 nodes across 3 different cloud providers.
- Built and extended multiple tools to allow teams to avoid reuse of work and ensure time to
production was as low as possible.
- Worked with Neo4j to spearhead their approach to kubernetes and ensure they were able to
support it.
- Worked to ensure all users of the PAAS were able to utilise its self service offering.
- Built relationships within numerous areas within the Home Office to ensure that getting things
done was as easy as possible.
- Supported teams with running kubernetess on bare metal using PXE-boot technology.
- Interviewed and hired multiple other DevOps engineers to build the team from 5 to 15.
- Main point of contact for developers, evangelising best practices and training, both on and
individual and team level.
- Reduced onboarding time from 1 month to 1 day, through automation.
- Increased the number of development teams utilising the platform from ~10, to ~50 over a 6
month period.
- Implemented chargeback system to ensure that all costs were being allocated to respective
development teams, and ensured they still saw at least a 40% reduction in cost.

Senior Devops Engineer

Style.com

- Designed and built Kubernetes platform on AWS
- Adapted scala application to run in a scalable manner, broke application into microservices.
- Designed ci pipeline to deploy code within 5 mins of git commit.
- Dockerised and redesigned application to run on docker, be fault tolerant and scale limitlessly.
- Worked to design a tolerant solution for running Datomic on kubernetes without losing state on pod restart.

Giles is a co-founder of Rebel Astronaut, a startup that aims to make companies more dynamic, flexible, and profitable by speeding up the time from idea to product release. He is also a principal site reliability engineer at Featurespace, a leading provider of adaptive behavioral analytics and fraud detection solutions. 

With over 8 years of experience in DevOps, security, and cloud computing, he has successfully delivered and implemented multiple transformation projects for various organizations, such as the London Stock Exchange Group, Pearson, and the UK Home Office. He has extensive knowledge and skills in infrastructure as code, Amazon Web Services, and DevSecOps methodologies. He is passionate about helping companies achieve their goals by increasing their security, efficiency, and agility.

It's now out!

If you missed our awesome conversation with Cat Hicks, PhD and Jennifer Pierce, PhD last week then you have an opportunity to catch it on video now. 

It was an excellent conversation where we discussed Developer Experience, Belonging and how to encourage more women into tech. 

I hope you enjoy it.

https://lnkd.in/ekv2YATg

#rebelastronaut

Giles Hinchcliff

We all want to belong. For some of us it’s easy, we turn up, we be ourselves and we’re accepted. Noone thinks twice, no one doubts or worries. And if we feel like we belong then we are more productive and our teams are more effective. Hicks, Lee,...

Open video: I Want to Belong - Creating Environments where Women Thrive. on youtube.com

I Want to Belong - Creating Environments where Women Thrive.

Feeling drained by toxic leadership at work?

Here are 5 tips to help you build resilience and maintain a positive mindset:

1. Focus on what you can control: Instead of getting caught up in office politics and negativity, shift your focus to your work, professional development, and personal well-being.

2. Find a support system: Whether it's friends outside of work, a mentor, or a therapist, having someone to talk to about your experiences can help you process your emotions and gain perspective.

3. Practice self-care: Make time for activities that help you relax and recharge, such as exercise, meditation, or hobbies. Taking care of your physical and mental health is crucial when you're working in a toxic environment.

4. Don't break your moral code. A moral injury can damage your sense of self long term far more than any short term BS some boss will give you.

5. Feel free to burn toxic bridges. You are judged by the caliber of your enemies after all :) 

Remember, you have the power to control how you respond to the situation. Stay resilient, and don't let the toxicity consume you. 


#rebelastronaut

Simple DevOps is a Lie.

We assume that by just merging Dev and Ops together, we magically get:

- Better communication
- Shorter time to market
- More resilient systems

But that's not the reality for most teams.

In many cases, Dev and Ops end up pointing fingers at each other when things go wrong.

So, how do we move from "DevOps" the lie to "DevOps" the truth?

1. Build empathy - Encourage Dev and Ops to understand each other's challenges.
2. Share responsibility - Everyone is responsible for the success of the project.
3. Automate everything - Use tools to bridge the gap between Dev and Ops.
4. Measure everything - Collect data to identify areas for improvement.

This is the hard work of DevOps.

It's not a simple solution, but it is a powerful one when done right.

#rebelastronaut

As a software developer, how do you address inefficiencies and reduce blocking dependencies in your team?

Start by using metrics.

Track lead time, deployment frequency, meantime to restore, and change fail percentage.

These metrics can help you identify bottlenecks and areas that need improvement.

Consider adding a "blocker count" to highlight specific issues causing delays.

Next, think about team properties.

How can you promote efficient flow and clarify service boundaries?

Consider accountability, especially financial accountability.

When service owners are responsible for the financial aspects of their services, they are motivated to establish clear boundaries and optimize for faster flow.

By leveraging metrics and team properties, you can not only address inefficiencies in your software development process but also foster a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration within your organization.

#rebelastronaut

"When writing code, clarity is key."

This is a mantra that I've followed throughout my career as a developer, and it has served me well.

Clarity in code means that anyone (including your future self) should be able to understand what the code is doing, without having to spend hours deciphering it.

How do you achieve clarity in your code?

1. Meaningful variable names: Instead of using single letters or vague names, choose names that describe the purpose of the variable.

2. Consistent formatting: Whether you use tabs or spaces for indentation, how you name functions, or where you place your curly braces, consistency makes the code easier to read.

3. Comments where necessary: While the code should be self-explanatory, there are times when a comment can provide clarity on the intent behind a certain piece of code.

4. Simplify logic: If a piece of code is too complex, see if there's a way to simplify it without sacrificing performance or functionality.

5. Refactor regularly: As requirements change and code evolves, it's important to revisit and refactor the code to keep it clean and maintainable.

Remember, the goal is not just to make the code work, but to make it easy for others to understand and build upon.

By prioritizing clarity in your code, you not only make life easier for your colleagues, but you also set yourself up for success in the long run.

#rebelastronaut

Taplio

Giles Hinchcliff's Linkedin Analytics

Giles Hinchcliff

What is Giles talking about?

Who is engaging with Giles

Giles Hinchcliff's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Taplio

.css-1jgreyo{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39,43,72,1) 0%, rgba(33,47,183,1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Giles Hinchcliff's Linkedin Analytics

Giles Hinchcliff

What is Giles talking about?

Who is engaging with Giles

Giles Hinchcliff's Best Posts .css-qqfgvy{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);}(last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Giles Hinchcliff's Linkedin Analytics

Giles Hinchcliff's Best Posts (last 30 days)