About Phlash - the techie career bits

[this post has been migrated back here from https://dev.to where I am no longer active]

I have been coding for 40+ years. I’m a recently retired (yay!)[edit: now part-time employed] senior technical architect (sounds great, means: do all the stuff nobody else wants to, make hard decisions and take responsibility for everything we ship!).

At a young age I made myself a promise: the day I get up and don’t want to play with a computer, I’ll give up this hobby and get a proper job…

A brief career history:

  • BT PLC from 1989-1996 as part of the speech application division (yep, SAD team), where I helped create CallMinder (now 1571) and early telephone banking systems, while learning all about speech recognition technology (neural nets, now known as machine learning or ‘AI’ :grin:)
  • Wireplay / Gameplay from 1996-2000 where I was technical lead for the UK’s first online (well, dialup!) video gaming service, and had my first unicorn startup experience, including resigning after 12months to…
  • Internet Designers Ltd from 2000-2007, an IT consultancy that grew from the initial 20 or so people to ~110 at its peak, where I worked on a multitude of smaller projects that varied from high reliability routers, through Java mobile games to managing BTexact Technologies website in a custom CMS..
  • Back to BT PLC, from 2007-2013 to become a security analyst and hand-picked member of a specialist team investigating the risks and developing the mitigations while BT deployed £6Bn worth of far-eastern telco equipment into the UK’s core communications network. No biggie!
  • GBGroup PLC from 2013-2020 when I retired. I was their first ’technical architect’, and helped design and deliver their identity intelligence services as they grew from ~300 people in a couple of UK offices to a global multi-national with 1100 people, 40 offices round the globe and a multitude of products and services, many a result of mergers and acquisitions (I also consulted into the M&A team - enlightening!)
  • WTW from 2024-present, where I am working 3 days a week to support their architecture function and generally be a nuisance!

I mostly program in these languages: C#, Java, Python, C, shell, ASM & enthusiasm!

If you like what I do, feel free to buy me a beer 🍺