Architect / DevOps / Designer / .NET Dev
and Linux / Server / Network Expert
Contact: [email protected]
Instagram: crypto.claw
Linked In: click here
Latest project work involves areas such as:
- Container Orchestration – Kubernetes / Swarm
- Git / GitLab / DevOps
- Containers – Docker / containerd
- Deployment Automation
- MVC based Web Applications
- Virtualisation and Cloud Solutions – Azure / RedHat oVirt / KVM
Skills and Technology - click for detailed list
* = most familiar
| Skill | Proficiency |
| Solution Documentation – Detailed Functional Design / Detailed Technical Design / Architecture Solutions | Advanced |
| Application Design – N-Tier Architecture* / SOLID / DRY / DI / SDC* / Waterfall / Agile / DevOps | Expert |
| Kubernetes – Helm, Cilium CNI, HashiCorp Vault incl Vault PKI, Flux GitOps, CertManager, K3S, Rancher, MetlalLB, Longhorn, NFS, OpenEBS, Sealed Secrets, Traefik, CI/CD | Proficient |
| Microsoft .NET – Visual Studio .NET / Core* / Framework* / ASP.NET / Web Forms / MVC* | Expert |
| Compiled Languages – C++ / C#* / Java | Expert |
| Web Services – REST* / SOAP / WCF | Proficient |
| ORM – Entity Framework* / Dapper / nHibernate / Code First* / Database First | Expert |
| DI Containers – Unity / Castle Windsor / Ninject / .NET Core IoC* | Advanced |
| Unit Testing – NUnit / MSTest* | Expert |
| Mark-up Languages – XML* / JSON / YAML | Expert |
| Scripting Languages – JavaScript* / JQuery / Python / PHP / ASP / VBScript | Proficient |
| SQL – MSSQL* / MySQL (InnoDB)* / SQLite / Clusters / Replication | Advanced |
| Source Control – Git* / GitLab / DevOps* / TFS* / Jenkins / Gitea / Drone | Advanced |
| Containers – Docker | Proficient |
| Container Orchestration – Kubernetes / Docker Swarm / Docker Compose* | Proficient |
| Networks – VLANs / VNETS / Routing / Site to Site VPNs / Firewalls / Load Balancing / Failover / NAT / OVN (OpenVSwitch) / Tunnels / Overlay Networks / Reverse Proxy Configuration | Advanced |
| System Administration – WDS / AD / AD Migration / LDAP / GPO / Permission Management / Filesystem Recovery / Replication / Root and Intermediate Certificate Authority Setup | Advanced |
| Document Management – SharePoint Development | Proficient |
| Linux Distributions – CentOS / Gentoo / RedHat / Ubuntu / Fedora / Arch | Expert |
| Linux Skills – BASH* / SSH* / Tunnels* / Cron / Filesystem Recovery / LDAP / LVM* / ZFS* / DRBD* / NGINX* / Apache* / HA Proxy | Expert |
| Automated Deployments – Ansible Playbooks / PowerShell / IaaC | Novice |
| Production – Deployments* / Zero Downtime Deployments / Automated Deployments / National and Critical System Tech Refresh | Expert |
| Cloud – Containers / Microservices / Azure / IaaS / SaaS / PaaS (.NET App Service Deployments) / ARM Templates / App Services / Worker Services / Migrations | Proficient |
| Virtualisation – VM Management / VM Networking / Red Hat Virtualisation Manager (oVirt)* / XEN* / KVM* / PCI Passthrough* / ARM Templates | Expert |
| FreeBSD – TrueNAS Core / Desktop | Advanced |
| VoIP – Cisco Phone Configuration / Asterisk / FreePBX / SIP | Proficient |
An Application Architect / DevOps Engineer / Designer / .NET Developer with great Linux / Server / Network skills for one of the UK’s largest digital service providers, Atos. During my 10+ years there I’ve lead work for some notable clients such as the NHSS, NHS, Princes MES, Travelex, the MoJ, NCP, Allianz Finance, Cineworld and the DCMS National Lottery.
In my main role as an Enterprise Architect, I have lead large scale modernization and transformation projects for critical national enterprise applications.
In the development arena I’ve worked heavily with Microsoft technologies; responsible for establishing good practice guidelines, design patterns (e.g. CI, Unit Testing, Check-In Policies, Coding Style Guidelines; Repository, DI Patterns etc) and mentor junior developers. I have leveraged DevOps principles to help our development teams increase velocity and code confidence. I’m enjoy working on several open source projects as well.
I’m currently working with Kubernetes, GitOps (Flux), Vault and CertManager. Kubernetes is a great technology I’m passionate about.
I’m part of the Atos Diversity and Inclusion programme, celebrating diversity in the workforce, as I believe diverse workforces are reflective of our customers allow us to be more innovative and productive.
A graduate in Computer Science with a four year sandwich course honours degree including a year working in the industry.
Open Source Interests
- Kubernetes – Rancher / K3S
- Virtualisation – XEN and KVM
- Microservices – Ocelot/Consul/RabbitMQ
- Cloud – OpenStack
- Containers and Container Orchestration
- Telecoms – FreePBX and Asterisk
- Linux – CentOS, Gentoo and Arch
- Python
Hobbies / Other Interests
- Competitive Rowing – Tees Rowing Club
- Gym
- Music – Flugelhorn and Cornet
NHS Scotland
Practitioner Counter Fraud Services
Further to my comments when I saw you in Livingston a few weeks ago, I would like to put on record my appreciation for all of Chris Law’s efforts throughout the eOphthalmic project. It is fair to say that he has been central to the successful delivery of this project. He has always been extremely helpful and willing to go the extra mile to get things done. He has been a pleasure to work with!
Atos Programme Manager
Chris has been vital to Iain’s eOphthalmic project and it is down to his expertise and customer focus that result in Atos being given more business.
Atos Project Manager
eOphthalmic, eDental and next eOrtho are regarded within the NHSS account as important and successful projects.
My feedback to you is that this is largely down to the efforts of one person, Chris, who has worked tirelessly over the last 3.5 years on this series of projects.
NHS Scotland Workforce Systems and SSTS (2022 – Current)
Role: Enterprise Architect for Workforce and SSTS
Update 2023: Since joining this project I’ve been asked to lead the modernization, transformation of one of the largest enterprise applications on the NHSS account. This involves redirecting the whole solution and attempting to resolve tremendous technical debt.
Oversee both Workforce Systems and SSTS technical direction. This involves designing future solutions, input to tooling (DevOps/GIT) and application architecture.
Workforce Systems is a payroll and expenses suite of applications. SSTS (Scottish Standard Time System) is time and rostering system. These are some of the largest enterprise applications on the account.
Occasionally involved with the more difficult aspects of development work when needed.
Managing development teams and provide a joined-up approach between Workforce and SSTS systems.
NHS Scotland Workforce Systems (2021 – 2022)
Role: Development Manager / Technical Architect
Manage a team of several developers for the NHSS Payroll system. A highly complex suite of applications for handling payroll nationally for the NHS in Scotland. Involved in modernisation and transformation, with a view to look at the future strategic direction of the project.
Moving the legacy system to a modern architecture with the latest design patterns and quality gates. Improving the tooling for the development team to support our delivery.
Northumbrian Water Ltd (2020 – 2021)
Role: Migration Architect / Consultant
Phased migration of on-premise data centre to Azure cloud for this utilities company. A transformation project as many legacy applications also required upgrading in the process.
Responsible for producing the solution and migration approach from on-premise to Azure.
NHS Scotland eOphthalmic and eDental Systems (2014 – Present)
Role: Architect / Designer / Developer
My primary role on this project was producing architecture, design documentation and work packages to feed into the development process. This involved critical infrastructure design for GP / Pharmacy infrastructure and applications.
Responsible for producing the architecture and design for two new national medical systems. Written in C# MVC and with full code analysis, unit testing and several well recognised design patterns / frameworks such as Dependency Injection and Entity Framework.
Responsible for designing changes to a large scale medical systems with parallel work streams, managing multiple deployments and producing branch merge strategies.
NHS Scotland Cloud Applications (2017-2018)
Role: Architect / Designer / Developer
Responsible for design and development of two national medical cloud applications. Applications consist of scalable C# .NET Core App Services. This involved use of both PaaS and IaaS, such as Azure SQL / Azure DNS / Azure AD (PaaS) and VM/resource/network provisioning (IaaS) respectively.
The project made use of Azure cloud features such as deployment slots and application configuration. These features were used to allow deployment with zero downtime and switching between Live, Test and Staging environments through deployment slots and Azure’s configuration management.
I was involved in the initial setup of the Azure Cloud Subscriptions and infrastructure including design and provisioning of vNets (Networking), VMs, VPNs and DNS.
AdoScope (2023 – Present)
Produced AdoScope a simple and flexible solution for managing your ADO.NET connections and transactions. It draws inspiration from the remarkable work in DbContextScope by Mehdime El Gueddari, whose DbContextScope library has been a source of great inspiration for the creation of AdoScope.
Red Hat Open Virtualisation (2022 – Present)
Deployed and run a Red Hat oVirt 3 node cluster. Includes vGPU / GPU / PCI Passthrough and nest virtualisation support.
OpenStack (2019)
Deployed OpenStack private cloud for small businesses. This involved OpenStack deployment configurations using, Xen, KVM, QEMU and nested virtualisation.
As a result of this I have knowledge of the underlying mechanics involved in IaaS and how it is achieved.
Xen Project (2011 – 2021)
Involved in configuring and testing Graphics Card passthrough and nested virtualisation for the Xen Project.
I have been a heavy Xen user for many years, currently running two Linux CentOS Xen Hypervisors with LVM, RAID 5 and Distributed Storage through DRBD, hosting several paravirtualised VMs with containerised applications including this online CV, followed by Xen Windows 10 CAD VMs for a family run engineering firm.
The combination of Xen and DRBD allows for high availability and failover.
Docker (2018 – Present)
Designed, built and contributed to several open source Docker container projects including: –
WatchPage – an MVC C# .NET Core application designed and built myself for posting and monitoring changes to various web pages.
BitWallet – A bitcoin wallet application. I contributed by improving security to the VNC UI through various code changes.