9-to-5 Luke

I’m currently working for Elastic as a Senior Software Engineer on the Elasticsearch open source project. I spend the majority of my time focusing on data managment features to help our users get the most of the platform with minimum effort.

Before that I was a Principal Software Enginner at Brandwatch where I spent 14 years working on many different big data processing projects along with time spent leading their developer experience function. This encompassed both the traditional operations side of things such as deploying, monitoring and maintaining applications and servers, but also had a hand in process and developer tooling. I find it equally satisfying writing code for customers as writing code that helps other developers deliver customer features faster and with less effort.

My core specialities are in the Spring Framework (Both using it and extending it to provide domain-specific features), Kubernetes, Networking (Physical and SDN) and generally the nuts and bolts parts of the web that most developers like to try and forget about like TCP, DNS, VRRP, BGP and other such indecipherable acronyms.

Free Time Luke

When away from the office, I like to spend some time contributing back to the developer community.

Both inside and outside work, spend a chunk of time providing mentoring to more junior developers, students and those wishing to break into the industry.

I serve on the programs committee of the Devoxx UK conference which is one of the largest community-led JVM conference in the UK and helps set the agenda of speaker for each year’s conference to provide a balance of relevant subjects.

I also have a passion for encouraging diversity in the technology industry and regularly give talks at colleges and universities and try to uncover some of the challenges of entering the industry for underrepresented groups. I have also served as an industry advisor a major south coast 6th form college, working to help them understand what is required in the modern technology workplace and how to make courses better appeal to a broader demographic.

More recently I have started to volunteer with St John Ambulance in a clinical role, providing first line emergency medical aid at events around the UK.

Outside the technical, I’m a bit eclectic with my hobbies. I dabble with electronics, gaming, flight simming, archery and visiting theme parks the world over. Food, however, has always been my number one passion and can often be found working on a recipe over and over again like I’m debugging a stubborn program, till it comes out just right.

Anything Else?

Nope, that’s the cliff notes version of my life. If you have any questions, comments or just want to say hi, then you can drop my a line via @_LukeWhiting on Twitter, @[email protected] on the Fediverse or e-mail [email protected]