Principal consultant

John Arundel (@bitfield) is a sysadmin, architect and systems integrator of 20 years experience and an independent consultant for the last 5 years. He was formerly a senior systems engineer responsible for datacentre operations in the enterprise hosting division of MCI/Verizon, then the world’s largest telecoms carrier. He specialises in helping small businesses to achieve enterprise-grade operations infrastructure, without enterprise budgets. John’s focus is on using advanced systems automation techniques to build high-performance, low-maintenance IT infrastructures.

Over the past few years John has worked with many companies including Mark Boulton Design, Wordtracker, People’s Music Store, an innovative web-based music marketplace, and CitySafe, a key provider of business resilience and incident co-ordination facilities for London’s local government and emergency services.

John holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science, with a research interest in kernel resource scheduler design, and is a certified Sun Solaris administrator, LPI (Linux Professional Institute) graduate, and a member of the British Computer Society (MBCS). He has previously worked as a software programmer writing in Ruby, Python, Perl, C, and Scheme, contributing to several open-source projects, and developing a high-performance research chess engine called Patzer. He is a published author of several technical books, a well-known expert on Puppet, the open-source configuration management system, and speaks regularly at technical user groups and conferences.

In his negligible spare time, John enjoys photography, Go, and driving his Lotus Elan.

“His skills have saved my life more than once. He’s a rare find: a sysadmin that really understands deploying Rails applications.”

— Dan Webb, Twitter developer

“Superb from both a technical and business angle, John makes everyone in the meeting room happy with his work. He will honestly, clearly and unbiasedly present all the best possible options, and then, if needs be, get his hands dirty on the command line - all at very affordable costs.”

— James Darling, founder of RewiredState

“He is a highly intelligent individual full of good ideas and supportive of people with whom he works. I look up to him as someone who is in possession of that rare combination of both talent and willingness to teach others.”

— Matthew Gourd, web content manager, Chartered Institute of Public Relations

Associates

Stephen Nelson-Smith (@LordCope) is a highly experienced sysadmin, technical leader and solutions consultant. With a solid grounding in technical account management at Digex, a well-respected enterprise managed hosting provider, he went on to lead the Unix ERP systems division at De La Rue, the world’s largest security printer. He is co-founder and CTO of Atalanta Systems, a privately-owned consulting firm, and an expert on agile methodologies, recently leading the introduction of Kanban techniques in a major UK Government IT department.

Stephen is based near Southampton and enjoys cycling, opera, and evangelising open source technologies.

“Stephen is a bright person with a thirst for knowledge. He has technical knowledge covering a wide area of software and architectures.”

— Henrik Morsing, AIX support specialist

“He has a deep technological understanding and an ability to learn new technologies very quickly. Stephen’s sheer brain power and problem-solving ability would be a great asset to any team. In my experience, Stephen could always be relied upon to come up with innovative solutions, and could often achieve in a matter of minutes something which others had failed to achieve in hours.”

— Rob Upham, senior solutions consultant

Fabian Sasson (@fabsass) is an information architect and designer who specialises in user experience. A former creative manager at Universal Music Group’s web division, he is currently chief designer for MinuteBase, an innovative online meeting organiser. Fabian’s interests include photography, cinema, and industrial design.

Richard Livsey (@rlivsey) is a technology strategist and entrepreneur who holds an M.Sc. in E-Business Management. Formerly Head of Technology at CitySafe, a key software provider to the Metropolitan Police and Special Branch, he is an expert on agile project management and a highly experienced technical leader. Apart from work, Richard enjoys motoring, politics and science fiction.