Jon Topper

CV

(last updated October 2008)

Contact details

You can contact me by email: < cv [at] topper.me.uk >

Postal address and telephone contact details are available on request. I am currently resident in London.

My LinkedIn Profile

Academic Qualifications

Other

Employment History

DateEmployerJob
November 2005 - present day

Trutap Ltd

(formerly Hotxt Ltd)

 Lead Developer & Systems Administrator 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 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 consisting of two other engineers, whose responsibilities 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
  • Build of a Xen platform for development work
  • Source control management and release management for fortnightly release cycle
  • MySQL database administration
  • Troubleshooting and monitoring of the live platform
August 2004 - November 2005

Legend Communications plc

(formerly Business Serve PLC, who acquired DSVR in May 2004)

 Senior Network and Systems Engineer Responsible for:
  • 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
June 2001 - August 2004 Designer Servers Ltd (DSVR) Support Manager / Software Developer
  • Developed control panel software (over 20,000 lines of OO Perl, C/C++ and XSL)
  • Managed team of up to 5 support engineers
(September 2000 - June 2001) n/a (Final year of degree at University Of Manchester)
June 1999 - September 2000

Designer Servers Ltd (DSVR)

(Work placement arranged as part of my degree)

 Support Engineer / Software Developer
  • Telephone and text support for around 1500 Virtual Server customers covering 60,000 domains
  • Training new engineers

In addition to the above employment, I and three other students founded a Limited Company, Active High Limited, to provide web hosting and bespoke web application software in February 1999. This company was active until February 2004, turning a small profit, and perhaps more importantly, giving us valuable insight into the mechanics and mathematics of running a business.

Computing skills

Operating Systems and Hardware

I have almost a decade of experience with UNIX operating systems. My main administrative experience is with Linux, though I have also had some exposure to FreeBSD and Solaris.

Although I have at some point used most of the other common distributions, my expertise lies in administering Red Hat Linux systems (both the Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise / CentOS strains) in an Enterprise environment, packaging software properly and engineering solutions which can be rolled out from a central location in a manner which is timely, repeatable, stable and secure. In some cases these services have been part of high-availability clusters.

In addition to my UNIX skills, I am able to use and administer systems running Windows. I'm familiar with both desktop and server x86 architecture, and I have installed and maintained PC systems both at work and at home.

I have two years of experience of Cisco IOS, with an understanding at approximately CCNA level.

Software Engineering

I have had commercial experience of the following languages:

In addition, I have limited experience of the following, either through brief exposure through work, University courses or recreational tinkering:

My main language of choice is currently Perl, for web development, data processing and systems administration. My main software project at Designer Servers (which was handed off to other engineers for maintenance) consisted of over 20,000 lines of Object Oriented perl, interacting with PostgreSQL, MySQL and LDAP databases as well as proprietry protocols developed in-house for the manipulation of server configuration. I have worked heavily with web technologies such as SOAP, XML (using all of SAX, DOM, XSLT), and I am familiar with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. At Hotxt, I used the Catalyst framework in order to rapidly construct web interfaces.

All of my software development to date has been for UNIX environments. I'm familiar with standard UNIX software tools such as CVS, Subversion and GNU Make. I'm highly skilled in the use of Red Hat's RPM tools for building software packages for deployment.

Software packages

I have used and maintained the following software packages and tools in a commercial environment:

Personality and people skills

Colleagues and clients find me easy to get on with both socially and within a work context. I am willing to work hard towards any goal in which I can believe. I am honest, and always willing to speak my mind. I have a good grasp of the English language and can express myself well in both speech and the written word.

I work equally well as an individual; as part of a group; and as leader of a team. I have around five years experience of team management.

Hobbies and Interests

I have a keen interest in film, frequently attending new cinema releases, and owning a sizeable DVD library. It is an ambition of mine to produce an independent film, and I have been involved in producing, photographing and editing digital video projects in the past.

Stills photography is also a hobby of mine: I own Canon equipment in both digital and analogue versions and I enjoy photographing both in a studio environment studio and outdoors.

I'm a very able chef, and I find cooking to be a good way of winding down at the end of a working day. My repertoire includes dishes from around the world, and I enjoy experimenting with new ingredients, recipes and techniques. I enjoy eating as much as cooking, and my Yorkshire roots have given me a fondness for a pint or three of real ale, leading me to become a card-carrying member of CAMRA.