Curriculum Vitae for Mike Atkinson

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Contact Details

M: +44 (0) 7767 777 756
H: +44 (0) 20 8510 3319
E: mike.atkinson@nelr.co.uk
Address: 56 Penshurst Road, London E9 7DT, UK

Personal Details

I am a U. K. Citizen with a permanent residence two miles from the City of London. I am tenacious, inventive, goal orientated and prepared to use my initiative in work activities. I am well disciplined in best I.T. practices, whilst maintaining good sense of humour. Personal satisfaction comes from enlightening and enthusing fellow employees.

I am in good health and I am looking for contractual work within a fifteen mile radius of London or alternatively abroad. I have an H.N.D. in Electrical and Electronic engineering.

Skill Summary

I have a solid technical background and I am most adept at rapid acclimatisation to new techniques and environments. I have worked with the UNIX operating system for the last 15 years where I have acquired excellent System Administration and Development skills on Linux (Fedora, SuSE and Ubuntu) and Solaris Platforms

Languages

I have a multi-faceted I.T. skill set with in-depth knowledge of the following

I have good knowledge of the following

Employment History Summary

All My Stuff Ltd.August 2012 to date
News International Newspapers Ltd.February 2011 to July 2012
Which? Ltd.July 2008 to September 2010
Arm LtdOct 2007 to April 2008
Tideway SystemsOct 2006 to August 2007
G4S Security Services (UK)Aug 2005 to Sept 2006
Travelling (Australia)first half 2005
West LB SystemsMay 2004 to December 2004
Quadriga LtdJan 2003 to Nov 2003
Various Small Office Contracts2002/2003
Deutsche BankJune 2001 to Jan 2002
Assendon TechnologiesApril 2001 to May 2001
Abbey National Treasury Services (now Santander)April 2000 to March 2001
Vodafone MannesmannJanuary 2000 to March 2000
P&O NedlloydJune 1999 to December 1999
Deutsche BankNovember 1998 to May 1999
Abbey National Treasury ServicesDecember 1997 to October 1998

Employment Details

All My Stuff Ltd

All My Stuff is a personal venture to create a Web Presence where subscribers can keep personal details secure and on-line

You may visit this site here

News International Newspapers Ltd

NI is dramatically increasing it's Web presence as the sales of paper newspapers continues to decline. As well as the tradition browser sites for the Sun, Times and Sunday Times editions, the Company offers Apps for IOS and Android devices.
My tasks with NI can be summarised as follows:

Which? Ltd.

Which? Ltd. have a strong Web presence providing it's Customers with a wide range of Product evaluations and assessments and other services. The Web site content is very dynamic and changes throughout the day. The structure of the site continues to evolve with a major recent taxonomy upgrade. A large quantity of site content is held on a relational database and accessed via compiled Tomcat jsp pages through various Web Applications.
I joined Which? in July 2008 to initially provide Business as Usual support for all development, test and live web sites. Shortly after, I moved on to become more involved with strategic project based work. This work is detailed below.

ARM Ltd.

Arm is an Enterprise, Worldwide Designer of Microprocessors with offices in Cambridge, Bangalore, Sunnyvale, Austin ....
The Company has designed microprocessors which have produced ten billion units.
Developers within the company use SVN (Subversion) to mange their source code at an appropriate local data centre. ARM extended SVN to allow load balancing across each Server in a data center, with Repository mirroring to provide resilience and a hot standby. Access Control was managed to directory level in each Repository. Repository data was held on a NetApps iSCSI filesystem and shared data on an NetApps NFS volume.
My work with ARM included

I successfully upgraded ARM's SVN Installation in Sunnyvale, California with no impact and zero down time for users.

Tideway Systems

Tideway Systems have developed an innovative software product that "Discovers" Computers on Company Networks.
My work with them included

G4 Security Services (UK)

G4 Security Services UK provide a wide range of Security services across the UK. My remit there was to re-engineer a Stolen Vehicle Recovery System. I worked with one other consultant to re-design the system and provide the appropriate infrastructure to develop and deploy this application. My tasks included the following.

WestLB Systems Ltd

WestLB Systems provide the I.T. infrastructure for WestLB Commercial Bank. My tasks and duties there were as follows:

Quadriga Worldwide Ltd

Quadriga provided innovative products for the Hotel Business. These products manage Hotel Billing, In-room checkout, Streaming Video, Guest Internet access and so forth. Most code was written in Java. I provided Product Engineering skills to manage code development, quality gates and deployment for these products.
Technically, this involved the following:

Miscellaneous Office Contracts

With the depression in the IT industry, I took on a number of small office contracts for a Barristers Chambers and other small businesses. These involved designing and planning local area networks and connectivity to the outside world (E-mail, Internet Browsing and in some cases providing an Internet site for the client. Security was paramount in the planning and to this end I used Linux (SuSE 8) running on an i386 machine with two network cards (Internet and Intranet). Packet Filtering and system hardening (fire walling) was done with iptables and validated with nmap.
I also provided some consultancy and support services to ABK (Bank of Kosovo).
As a background task, I wrote a distributed batch scheduling and machine management system with built in DR fail over.

Deutsche Bank

I rejoined Deutsche Bank to port the internally written overnight batch scheduling system for the Summit application to Control-M. My work involved leasing with the Deutsche's Control-M team to ensure the Infrastructure was in place to do this and porting the existing bourne, Korn shell and Perl scripts to run under Control-M. These scripts accessed the Summit Database which ran under Sybase ASE 11.5
I also designed and manage the Solaris (V2.6) NFS changes so the Control-M logging for each server was applied to the same filesystem.
Finally I negotiated the SLA between the OTC team and the Control-M team. Because there was no Microsoft Windows client applications for Control-M, I proposed, designed and wrote an Intranet based MIS tool to extract statistics and status information from the Control-M database. The Code was written in Perl with embedded TSQL and used the Perl Sybase DBI/DBD CPAN modules.

Assendon Technologies

Asssendon Technologies manufacture an innovative Internet bases security product based on a credit card size token provided to the user and a Validation Server. This token generates a numerical authentication string that changes every minute. The validation server duplicates the algorithm for a token on receiving an authentication string and responds with an accept message if the authentication strings agree or a reject message if they do not.

I was taken on to manage the Company's I. T. infrastructure. To do this I set up a L.A.N. and built a Linux File/print server with an ISDN connection to the HP-UX Validation Servers. I also designed a data model for the Validation Server Database (Oracle 8i) to provide a flexible platform for future customer requirements.

Abbey National Treasury Services.

I rejoined Abbey National to provide Back Office support for the Summit application running on a Sybase database on Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 Servers. I wrote monitoring and management information tools for Summit processes and the Control-M batch scheduler installation. I designed a code deployment and management tracking system for code deliveries to UAT, Live and DR environments. I provided training for other teams in the use of Perl and ported Korn shell scripts which traditionally used the Sybase isql Sybase binary to Perl using embedded SQL and the Perl CPAN DBI/DBD modules
I provided software environment definition tools written in korn shell to allow easy access to test, UAT, disaster recovery and live environments and to keep these environments separate. I successfully designed and implemented a Source Code Control System based on Cygnus CVS and trained developers in it's use.

Ft.com

I provided configuration management and release support to Ft.com during the extended vacancy of the Company's Configuration Manager. FT.com used Digital Island to provide the Sun Microsystems Machines running Solaris 2.6 that formed the core of the Company's web site. Ft.com used CVS for code management and internally written Korn shell scripts to manage the control and deployment of Web Content through UAT and on to the Live environment. I developed and enhanced these scripts during my contract with Ft.com

Vodafone Mannesmann Gmbh

I joined Vodafone Mannesmann GmbH in Düsseldorf as part of a team of five people from the UK to provide an E-commerce product prototype for the CeBIT show in Hanover. My tasks included:

P&O Nedlloyd

I joined P&O Nedlloyd to provide support within the AIX/HPUX/Linux technical support group. During my time at P&0 I successfully achieved the following:

Deutsche Bank

I joined Deutsche Bank as part of the UNIX System Administration Team (four people) to support the Solaris platforms within the Bank's front office trading room. Applications running on these platforms included Summit, ATW, ODS, Veritas, Orbix, Jetadmin, Apache, Samba etc. A wide range of Open Source tools such as CVS, Emacs, Java, Netscape, ghostscript were also supported.  This support role encompasses about one hundred and fifty machines ranging from Sparc stations to E4000's. The system was glued together using NIS+, with separate Development, UAT and Production domains.  As well as the re-active day-to-day support of this environment, my tasks included the following:

Abbey National Treasury Services

Abbey National was moving into the User Acceptance Testing Phase of a new Treasury System that used the Summit application. I joined them to head up the procurement, preparation and configuration of the Hardware and Software required for this phase. The Hardware Platforms to support this phase of the System were Sun Ultra E450 Servers running Solaris Version 2.5.1. Applications running on this system include Kondor+, Summit and Abbey's message routing system. All applications used Sybase Version 11 databases to provide repositories for static and dynamic data.
I successfully completed the following tasks: