9-to-5 Luke

My day job is as a staff engineer at a mid-size SaaS company. I spend my time looking after exabyte scale big data stores and writing Java middleware to glean sweet nuggets of insight from those vast data lakes.

Other than cursing at the JVM, I also have an interest in developer operation. This encompasses both the traditional operations side of things such as deploying, monitoring and maintaining applications and servers but I’m also interested 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 to help remove some stigma of the industry amongst 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 underrepresented communities.

Outside of 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, or e-mail [email protected]