01 / Introduction

David Collom

I help engineering organisations build platforms their developers can rely on.

I came into platform engineering through software development and still prefer to stay close to the code. Much of my work has been about removing avoidable delivery and operational work.

Project showcase Field notes

01 Platform delivery 3 to 6 weeks → 1 to 2 hours Reduced environment delivery from a multi-week request process to a repeatable internal platform workflow. 02 Operational scale 400+ e-commerce sites Built and supported the infrastructure and automation behind a large, PCI-conscious hosting estate. 03 Community contribution KubeCon + ArgoCon I have spoken at KubeCon, ArgoCon and community events about Kubernetes cost, reliability and problems we ran into doing the work.

02 / Evidence

A few things I've worked on

These are three concrete examples from different points in my career. The project page has more detail on what I owned, built or contributed.

01Platform delivery

3 to 6 weeks → 1 to 2 hours

Reduced environment delivery from a multi-week request process to a repeatable internal platform workflow.

02Operational scale

400+ e-commerce sites

Built and supported the infrastructure and automation behind a large, PCI-conscious hosting estate.

03Community contribution

KubeCon + ArgoCon

Spoken at KubeCon, ArgoCon and community events about Kubernetes cost, reliability and lessons from real incidents.

03 / Focus

What I tend to work on

Platform engineering

Internal platforms that take recurring delivery work out of tickets and give teams a supported route to production.

Developer experience

Finding the awkward parts of build, delivery and operations, then fixing them with the teams who use them every day.

Reliability & automation

Kubernetes operations, GitOps and automation for systems that need to be understandable when something goes wrong.

Technical leadership

Architecture and technical direction backed by prototypes, code and a clear account of the trade-offs.

04 / Philosophy

"I like finding work that engineers have learned to put up with, then working out whether the platform can remove it. Sometimes that means code; sometimes it means fixing the process around the code."

I still like getting hands-on. Architecture decisions tend to improve when the person making them has recently had to debug the result.

05 / Connect

Working through a difficult platform problem?

If the problem involves Kubernetes, developer platforms or too much manual operational work, I'm always happy to compare notes.

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