Bio: Julian Turnbull
Born and brought up in Glasgow.
First encountered computers while at school, writing in Algol-60 for an ICL machine, back in the days when faster turnround meant putting a first-class stamp on the envelope.
Read Maths and Natural Philosophy (or "Physics" to the less pretentious) at Glasgow, then moved off in another directory, studying Divinity and, in due course, being ordained as a minister of the Church of Scotland. Returned to university (Edinburgh this time) after a few years in the Church's service to do a taught MSc in Computer Systems Engineering, after which I stayed on in the department as a Computing Officer.
After eleven years working for the University, curiosity prompted a move into industry, first to software company Harlequin, then to a small internet consultancy, and then, in 2000, to the Edinburgh R&D office of Xilinx Inc, where I manage a mix of Linux and Windows systems in support of engineers developing IP cores for programmable devices.
Bio: Aaron Brady
Aaron Brady is Technical Development manager at iWeb, a web agency and FTP services company with in-house hosting. He has been a professional system administrator and software developer for 14 years and contributes to open source projects on a "little, but often" basis. He can barely remember life before being on-call for something or other.
Bio: Jan-Piet Mens
Jan-Piet Mens is an independent Unix/Linux consultant and sysadmin who's worked with Unix-systems since 1985. Jan-Piet does odd bits of coding and has architected infrastructure at major customers throughout Europe. One of his specialities is the Domain Name System and as such, he authored the book Alternative DNS Servers as well as a variety of other technical publications. (http://mens.de)
Bio: Stew Wilson
Stew Wilson is a Windows system administrator in the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. His work includes the ongoing development and expansion of the school's Machination configuration management software to meet the needs of researchers and academics.
Bio: Stephen Quinney
Stephen Quinney is a member of the FLOSS UK Council. He works as a Senior Computing Officer working for the School of Informatics in the University of Edinburgh. His primary role involves supporting the LCFG configuration management system which is used within the School and the University to manage approximately 3,700 Linux and MacOSX based desktops and servers.
In his spare time he's more likely to be found half-way up a mountain and/or drinking nice whisky.
Bio: Tim Flethcer
Tim Fletcher – Technical Consultant, is a skilled systems architect and integrator, with extensive project management and team leadership experience. He has 13 years experience working in the education sector, in both one of the largest schools in the UK (Parrs Wood High School) and as part of Manchester Children's Services technical team.
At Parrs Wood he built and led the team that designed and supported the network of one the largest schools in the UK, integrating many technologies using a "best of breed" approach to create a constantly available network with over 800 workstations and 2300 users.
As a key technical member of the team that built the network to link every school in Manchester to a single WAN, Tim had to work with many different stakeholders in order to achieve the goal of linking all 150 schools to a single education focused WAN providing Internet access and webmail to every teacher in Manchester.
With his in-depth knowledge and experience in network design, management, monitoring and security as well as a broad understanding of open source technologies, storage and backup systems and virtualisation, Tim will be working alongside the Sales Specialist in education at Brighter Connections to help increase the company’s presence in the education market.
Bio: Benjamin Jefferson
Ben Jefferson has over 14 years experience in I.T. having entered the industry at Planet Online, the first business to business ISP in the UK.
At Planet Online Ben was part of the team managing the explosive growth of Freeserve where over 2 million users subscribed in the first 4 months of going live. Ben then moved to Sense Internet in Leeds where he became CTO managing a team of web applications developers responsible for the design, development and maintenance of leading brand websites such as Travelodge, BAFTA and Rizla. He architected fast growing sites where database integration and PCI-DSS compliant payment systems were critical to the success of the clients.
Ben joined Brighter Connections in October 2010, as Technical Director, and has been working on elevating the accreditation of the company with leading brand vendors such as Cisco, VMware, NetApp and HP. he has also brought his knowledge and expertise of open source development, high quality documentation and security skills to bear internally and with clients across the UK.
With the company poised for greater growth than ever before, Ben now heads up a team of highly skilled consultative professionals that are ready to help our clients Profit from I.T. Ben will join the Board of Directors in July 2012 further underlining Brighter Connections’ commitment to developing its service offering for clients long into the future.
Bio: Toshaan Bharvani
Toshaan Bharvani is a IT consultant, currently self-employed at VanTosh, with a interest in Open Source Software and IT Hardware. He started his IT interest at the age of 5, when his father gave him his first own PC components. Ever since he has been interested in IT hardware and IT software. In business, he tends to combine higher level applications with lower level systems. Toshaan has been involved for some time now in some open source projects and communities.
Bio: David Jones
David is First Engineer at ScraperWiki and director of the non-profit Climate Code Foundation.
He has been creating software professionally for nearly 20 years in so many different languages and systems that it's difficult to remember; garbage collectors, robotics, language implementation, software tools and of course, the most recent fad for web based software services.
David believes that The Unix Way and Open Source Software will continue to be two of the most important tools in our fight against increasing software complexity.
Bio: Chris Blower
Chris Blower (Platform Engineer at ScraperWiki Limited, @chrisb33) got his start programming on Acorn computers, and has since coded everything from telnet talkers to web-enabled telephony applications. He enjoys learning different technologies, flashpacking and photography.
Bio: Bernd Erk
Bernd Erk, is co-founder and project organiser of the Icinga project that has been busy improving the forked Nagios code base since 2009.
In his day job as Managing Director of NETWAYS he overseas success and smooth operation of all customer projects and business processes. His technical expertise stretches across Systems Management, Managed Services and Software Development. A contributor to Linux Magazine and Linux Technical Review in Germany, Bernd regularly publishes articles and presents on open source topics ranging across Nagios monitoring, XEN virtualization, MySQL database monitoring and performance tuning among others. Bernd was previously Operating Systems Specialist at Quelle Schickedanz AG & Co., where he worked heavily with Solaris, HPUX and Oracle databases. After which, Bernd spent 8 years as Business Unit Manager at Ise-Informatik where he dealt with Oracle databases and service oriented architectures.
Bio: Simon Riggs
Simon Riggs has been a PostgreSQL developer for 9 years and is now one of the few project committers worldwide. His work builds upon more than 25 years as a database specialist working on commercial high performance/very large databases. Simon is the CTO of 2ndQuadrant, the leading developers of PostgreSQL.
Bio Jonathan Clarke
Jonathan Clarke is the CTO of Normation, a software company he co-founded in Paris in 2009. He has been working in IT infrastructure, almost exclusively with open source tools, since his beginnings as a system administrator. His work is now focused around automation for configuration and auditing, in particular Rudder (http://www.rudder-project.org). He is also a contributor to several open source projects including CFEngine, LSC and OpenLDAP. In his spare time, he enjoys good food, real ale, cinema and cycling around Paris.
Bio Jeffrey Gehlbach
Jeffrey has a diverse background in IP network engineering, UNIX and Linux systems administration, systems and network management, and free software. He built his first Linux kernel in 1994 on a 486SX PC, and has been working with and managing IP networks since the days when the domain term “cloud” always followed “ATM” or “frame relay”. Jeffrey is lucky enough to work as Principal Consultant for The OpenNMS Group, and has been a member of the Order of the Green Polo since 2006.
Jeff loves free software, network management, telephony, and disruptive technologies. He's lucky enough to be alive at a time when all those things are converging, and somehow managed to find a way to get paid to work with all of them.
Bio Ian Norton
Ian is a keen Perl hacker co-founding and co-chairing Northwest England Perl mongers for the last four years. In other open source roles, he has held an active role on the FLOSS UK Council since 2011 and is a member of The Perl Foundation Marketing committee.
Lately his focus has gone back to an old love in the form of network monitoring and management since working on an OpenNMS project for his previous employer.
When not wrangling Exim, herding Linux systems or hanging around in IRC channels, he can be found contributing to the Manchester Hackspace or working on his automated coffee roaster.
Bio John Hackett
John Hackett is a sysadmin at the UK's self-declared "geek hosting outfit of choice" after having been a beta tester for its BigV platform, and a past customer. He came to the company in 2012 and has since been on technical support, troubleshooting and development work since.
With a background in administering and monitoring LAMP stack machines, John has been leading the way in pushing forward Steve Kemp's Custodian monitoring tool at Bytemark, with an interest in expanding its scope to do full-network scans for misconfigured services.
John is a regular participant in roller derby and aspires to own a programmable quadrocopter. controversially, his favourite drink is extremely milky sugary coffee.