Technology, Cloud & Systems Thinking
Operations leader who moved into systems, not away from them
I built a long career in hospitality operations before making a deliberate move into technology. People sometimes read that as a career change. I don’t experience it that way. The questions I was asking on a restaurant floor and the questions I ask about a piece of infrastructure now are the same questions: why does this process exist, who is affected if it changes, and what happens when the system meets reality instead of the plan.
What I have done
Technology Consultant, National Crime Agency (via Ten10 Academy, now Scale Factory, July 2024 to July 2026) Worked within a highly sensitive national law enforcement environment under eSC Enhanced Security Check clearance, supporting technical operations across a secure dual-network environment. Role details are restricted in line with the confidential nature of the organisation. I spent a lot of my time outside the restricted work in recurring meetings where the same operational problems kept resurfacing without ever being resolved, not because people didn’t care, but because nobody owned the fix. That pattern taught me as much about how organisations work as any project I could name.
Synket (independent software studio, founded June 2026) Every product is designed, built, secured and deployed end to end by me, from architecture decisions through to production. It is where certification study turns into shipped software rather than staying theoretical.
Personal homelab (ongoing since 2024) A Proxmox environment running 25+ LXC containers, including an AI-powered infrastructure agent built on AWS Bedrock. I have migrated this portfolio site itself twice, VPS to Cloudflare Workers, then to a production AWS S3/CloudFront architecture with GitHub Actions CI/CD, and documented the real outages and fixes at each stage rather than presenting a tidy finished result. The site has stayed up through every migration since.
Certifications AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect Associate in progress. ITIL v4 Foundation completed during initial technology training.
My approach
I take the same three questions into every environment, a struggling restaurant or a fragile piece of infrastructure: what is actually happening here, who owns fixing it, and how would we know if the fix worked. Most operational and technical problems trace back to people, process, or technology, in that order, and treating the symptom instead of the cause is how the same issue ends up back on the agenda six months later.
That instinct is why I do not just collect certifications. A qualification tells you I can pass an exam. A homelab I have run, broken, and rebuilt tells you I understand what happens when the neat architecture diagram meets an actual outage at 2am.
Underpinned by operational leadership elsewhere
The background on the hospitality side of this site is not a separate career I am leaving behind. Managing multi-site P&L, new openings, and teams of over a hundred people under real pressure is where I learned to stay calm, communicate clearly, and make a call when it matters. That is the same discipline, applied to infrastructure instead of a dining room.