Ste Jackson Personal Website

About Me

Hello, as you will have worked out I'm Ste Jackson. I thought I'd build this site as a bit of a L&D project. Somewhere to host my CV, do some HTML/CSS editing, alongside deploying and building it via GitHub Actions, Terraform, AWS and Cloudflare. You can find more on that in the site build section.

Anyway, a bit about me. I am a DevOps Engineer but I have been working in IT since 2016. If I'm not at work, you will usually find me doing one of these:

• Gym
• Spending time with my Fiancee
• Spending time with family & friends
• Playing on the steamdeck
• Or doing some form of DevOps related study

CV

Here you will find my CV, Please reach out to me via LinkedIn if you would like to discuss anything.

Core Skills and Technologies

• Cloud: AWS (EKS, Lambda, S3, ECR, Route53, IAM, CloudFront)
• Infra as Code: Terraform, Chef
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Groovy, GitOps, Ansible
• Scripting: Bash, Python, Groovy
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Telegraf, Sensu
• Leadership: Mentoring, Technical Planning, Agile Delivery Lead practices

Key Achievements

• Alongside our Principal SRE, lead the upgrade of over 200 servers including 190 production ones, for a major PHP 7.4 to 8.1 upgrade.

• Part of “Project Pipeline” taskforce, a multidisciplinary group of people to improve the pipelines across our inherited tech stack. Included multi-staging Dockerfiles, rewriting and optimising github actions alongside leveraging CloudFlare pages for testing and more. Saw improvement ranging from 5 to 50% time savings.

• Lead the onboarding of a whole new stack into our squad when we merged two brands on to one tech stack. Documenting and sharing knowledge, and a key point of contact for all queries around the new stack.

• Volunteered to carry out back-to-back EKS Upgrade, this involved getting a team together consisting of DevOps resource, software engineers and performance testers. Then had to prepare, deliver and review the plan after each upgrade.

Employment

Sky Betting & Gaming / Flutter

DevOps Engineer May 2023 - Present

• Configure and support CI/CD pipelines across 4 different tech stacks and brands, including Jenkins, GitHub Actions and GOCD.
• Acting as an enablement function for other teams in the business, including deal with incoming support tickets across a weekly rota.
• Worked on multiple and on-going EKS upgrades, including config and helm chart changes.
• Monitoring and maintaining several Kubernetes clusters for multiple products.
• Managing scaling, both automatic and manual, across different servers depending on load.
• Implementing, developing and managing IaC for multiple products, usually through Ansible, Chef and Terraform.
• Network management for our products through Akamai, Cloudflare and on-prem networking.
• Streamlining processes and documenting them to help other teams self-serve.
• Covered two on call rotas.

DevOps Engineer Secondment Jan 2023 - May 2023

• Seconded 1 or 2 days per week in to a DevOps squad, given smaller tickets to pick up and work on both by self-learning and mentored by other members of the squad

Martech SysAdmin March 2021 - May 2023

• Managed admin and configuration of a wide range of advertising and marketing systems, including tag management, audience selection, fulfilment tools (SMS/ Email) and digital marketing platforms.
• Ensured system integrity and compliance, overseeing user access, security settings (GDPR), and documentation of system processes, while identifying opportunities for improvements.
• Provided technical support resolving user issues, handling system alerts, facilitating data flows for dashboards and BI reporting, and assisting with upgrades and troubleshooting.
• Acted as Lead Engineer during a six-month vacancy and representing the MarTech domain to stakeholders across the organisation.

StepChange Debt Charity

Service Desk Team Lead March 2019 - March 2021

• Led Critical IT projects and deployments, including remote mass software updates, Office 365 rollout, Papercut implementation and IT office infrastructure upgrades ensuring seamless delivery and ongoing support.
• Providing senior level tech suppprt, acting as key escalation point between service desk and infrastructure teams. Delivery 2nd/3rd line support alongside training new members of the team and covering for service desk manager absence.
• Drove operational excellence by introducing new technologies and working practises, managing change, incident and problems in line with ITIL standards, alongside maintaining a skill matrix for continuous improvement in the team.
• Recognised for high performance and leadership by consistently rated as a top performer in KPIs, resulting in two over achieving appraisals and a promotion to Team Lead.
• Supported both in hours, out of hours on call and weekend IT Operations including site visits and stay overs.

Service Support Engineer October 2016 - March 2019

• General 2nd line service desk / tech support tasks i.e troubleshooting softwatre and hardware issues, unlocking accounts, AD and GPO management etc.

Three non IT roles (most present first)

• Correspondence Advisor (Stepchange), Recruitment Consultant (Manpower), Bar Staff (Tiger 10/Parish) September 2012 - October 2016.

Education

York St John University 2012-2015

• BA(Hons) Physical Education & Sports Coaching degree.

Hanson School & Sixth form

• BTEC Sport National Extended Diploma – Triple Distinction*
• 5 GCSE A-C including Maths and English.

Build

To build the site i used a premade HTML/CSS site, then just amended bits of the HTML to suit what i wanted it to look like.

This isnt the first time ive done this, i did it for my wedding website to and the code for this can be found in the same repo here.

This was the old site build architecture;

It was the first DevOps style personal project i really did, however after gaining some more knowledge especially around Cloudflare, i wanted to take this further and add some protection around the site so i could share it on LinkedIn.

This time around i saw a colleague, George, do some work where he pointed an AWS Cloudfront distribution at Cloudflare so we could take advantage of the WAF, DDoS protection etc that we get.

So this time round the site will be deployed upon a push to the GitHub folder it sits in, a GitHub Action will then kick off to run the Terraform to build the s3 bucket, build the cloudfront distribution and the ACM cert. Then gitHub Actions will copy the contents of the site to s3, and invalidate the current cache so it updates instantly. There will already be a DNS record set in Cloudflare that points the cloudfront distribution at stejackson.com.

nNew site architecture can be found here:

More info on the deployment can be found in the git repo for the site here.

Socials

Here are the links to my LinkedIn and my GitHub profile.

Inside my GitHub you can expect to find repos for my Homelab and the static site mono repo that contains both the code for my wedding website and this one.

Over time i will add more too, who knows what projects i'll push up!

• LinkedIn
• GitHub

Elements

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