Hi,
I’m Andy, a Freelance DevOps Consultant,
Web Developer & Sys Admin
from Bristol, UK.

Computer screen showing code editor

Skills & Qualifications

I have over 20 years professional full stack experience with the Web and other Internet technologies.

  • I consult on Chef, Vagrant, Ansible, Jenkins and Git build and Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery systems.
  • I have extensive experience with LXC, Docker and CoreOS.
  • I've used Kubernetes, Google Container Engine, Amazon ECS and Docker Machine to run Docker containers in production.
  • I am a Certified ScrumMaster and have led many successful agile software projects.
  • I make and maintain high-traffic websites and web apps. They are well engineered, highly-available and serve millions everyday.
  • I use the correct technology for the situation and have experience with PHP (often with Laravel or CakePHP; sometimes with Slim) and Python (often with Django; sometimes with Flask) and Perl, Ruby, C and Java.
  • Browser side, I'm familiar with CSS, Javascript and HTML. I have used Backbone.js, Backbone.Marionette, jQuery and jQuery Mobile to create rich client-side applications.
  • I do test-driven systems administration on Linux (Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS) and FreeBSD boxes and use Chef to automate the provisioning, configuration, management and deployment of those boxes with ChefSpec, Test Kitchen/Kitchen.ci and Severspec to automate testing.
  • I develop with Test Driven Development and have used PHPUnit, Jasmine, unittest and Cucumber.
  • I have experience managing environments both on bare metal and in the Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Rackspace, Brightbox, Linode and Digital Ocean clouds.
  • I'm founder and organiser of the Bristol DevOps and Birmingham DevOps meetup events.

I'm currently accepting work. Please email andygale@andy-gale.com and we can discuss your needs further.

Speaking

I've spoken at conferences both home and abroad as well at local events in Bristol.

Mitigating DDOS Attacks with Terraform

  • PHPSW, Bristol, England
  • 9th November 2016

Container Security

  • Bristol DevOps, Bristol, England
  • 21st September 2016

Test-Driven Infrastructure

  • Birmingham DevOps, Birmingham, England
  • 24th February 2016

Nobody likes you Jenkins

  • PHPSW, Bristol, England
  • 14th October 2015

PHP Migrations with Phinx

  • PHPSW, Bristol, England
  • 8th April 2015

Test-Driven Infrastructure

  • Bristol DevOps, Bristol, England
  • 18th March 2015

Terraform

  • PHPSW, Bristol, England
  • 8th Oct 2014

Chef and Docker

  • Bristol DevOps, Bristol, England
  • 1st October 2014

Auto-scaling PHP applications using Chef and AWS

  • PHPSW, Bristol, England
  • 12th Feb 2014

Testing Javascript

  • Southville JS, Bristol, England
  • 16th May 2013

Bristol Skillswap on Vagrant

  • Bristol Skillswap, Bristol, England
  • 18th March 2013

Using Vagrant

  • Bristol Web Folk, Bristol, England
  • 9th October 2012

Avoiding surprises with Chef and Vagrant

  • CakeFest, Manchester, England
  • 30th August - 2nd September 2012

Flexible site structure with CakePHP

  • CakeFest, Manchester, England
  • 30th August - 2nd September 2012

CakePHP at massive scale on a budget

  • At CakeFest, Chicago, Illinois
  • 2nd - 5th September 2010

Please email andygale@andy-gale.com if you'd like me to speak at your event.

Recommendations

People who've worked with me say nice things.

Gareth Lancaster, CTO at Scredible

Andy provided a first class DevOps service to Scredible for well over a year. He was instrumental in the organisation of our infrastructure and introduced Chef and Jenkins into our workflows to provide continuous integration and continuous deployment. In addition, it was his suggestion when I faced him with a scaling problem, to suggest Elasticsearch, a decision that proved pivotal for our systems to scale and a system we ended up embracing in a number of areas. He provided a custom deployment, permissions and environment management service that allowed all developers to quickly and easily manage their access, monitor services and deploy selectable commits to development, staging and production. It’s fair to say that we benefited greatly from his support, ability, and dedication.

Ed Massey, Head of TechOps at Brightpearl

The Brightpearl TechOps team has enjoyed Andy's full stack devops skills for the last year or so. He has been massively instrumental in bringing all the infrastructure code and continuous delivery pipeline up to date. He's always experimenting with new technologies and finding their pros and cons.

Above all he's pragmatic in his approach, very good at considering a project's stakeholder requirements and thoroughly good natured in the way he goes about his work. It's been a real pleasure to have Andy on our team and I'd wholeheartedly recommend him to any business looking to propel their developer operations in to the 21st Century.

portfolio

A cross section of some of the sites I have worked on.

Proton Cars

Rebuilt Find a dealer section using Bing Maps API, PHP, Javascript and jQuery.

T3

I was Systems Architect and Technical Project Lead during the rebuild of the popular Future Publishing website T3 using CakePHP, Memcache, ActiveMQ and MySQL.

Cyclingnews

Systems Architect during the rebuild of the world's number one cycling site. There are lots of cycling fanatics in the world and the site uses a CakePHP CMS and custom PHP and Memcache content delivery platform which copes fantastically with all the intense traffic peaks.

Barclays Premier League

Worked on the official Premier League fantasy football game using Python, Django, Backbone.js, Backbone.Marionette and jQuery.

Bikely

Systems Architect on rebuild of Bikely, a cycle routes web application from Future Publishing. Used CakePHP and MongoDB. MongoDB was selected for it's geospatial functionality which allow the addition of innovative new map based features.

Monarch

Monarch continue to run their business on a custom PHP content management based on the system I architected over 10 years ago.

writing

I wrote a book.

Getting started with Chef

Learn how to configure, manage and provision cloud servers with Chef by following practical examples with real world applications.

Archive articles

Positive Cache Expiry with CakePHP

Using core CakePHP functionality to implement positive cache expiry.

View Caching with Memcache and CakePHP

Using CakePHP and Memcache to deliver pages of your website faster than fast. (Historical page)

Before You Implement Caching on Your Website

As well as thinking about caching you should also optimise your code. This introduction to profiling PHP with xDebug should help get you started.

Development Environments

Some thoughts about web development environments and why you should be doing your development inside a virtual machine. See my presentation on Vagrant for an up-to-date take on this.