about

Hey! I’m Will! 29, from England. I’m a musician and engineer, based in Kreuzberg, Berlin. I have been in the DevOps universe since around 2017 now, but I am really interested in lots of areas of computer science. At the moment, I work as a DevOps Engineer at PEAT GmbH, and have help build and maintain infrastructure and architecture across a host of services there. Originally, I grew up with a more audio-artsy-based background, but I got into engineering later on. I studied 🎹 Music(BA) and Computer Science(MSc) at university.

education

Computer Science (MSc), University of York, 2016 - 2017

Exposed to a wide-range of computer science disciplines:

• Software Engineering (I really like old-school UML)
• OO Programming Concepts
• Computer Architecture
• High-distributed Performance Computing
• Software Testing
• Database Systems
• Information Systems and Organisations
• Self-defined my own 6-month research project that used Max/MSP, called Kluster. This is available on Github and will soon be available as a Max Package.

Music (BA) (2:1) , University of Sussex, 2011 - 2014

Introduced to programming with Supercollider, a C-style syntax, and produced algorithmic compositions and my own virtual software instrument as part of the course project. See my website for more on this. Continue to pursue composition and production as a passion.

relevant experience

DevOps Engineer, PEAT GmbH (Plantix), 2019 - present

As an engineer and Head of DevOps at PEAT (the only DevOps engineer actually), I work on the mission to help transform our engineering into a high-performance organisation, by being part of the discussions to prepare technical architecture, micro-services and engineering teams for future growth.

At Plantix, we help millions of small-scale farmers diagnose crop diseases using our machine learning algorithms and a single picture taken with their smart phones. Measurable social impact, indirect environment change and improving agricultural farming and sustainability not to mention an amazing bunch of workmates and friends were just some of the reasons I chose to work here at PEAT.

Software Developer/Platform Build Engineer, CVSSP, September 2017 - July 2019

Part of an EPSRC research project (named S3A) with BBC Research & Development departments for Computer Vision and Signal Processing, in collaboration with the Universities of Southampton and Salford, the project was focused on integral research in object-based audio for immersive home environments. I formed part of the development team to engineer cross-platform applications for the audio research and creative communities.

where I’m going

The same place I am now, just a little older, and a little wiser. I would move into a leadership-based role, as I discovered from previous roles and experience that this is what I loved most. I loved to lead, and I want more experience in it. I also want to become a better cook, a better programmer and a better pianist. I guess I want to get pretty smart in one programming language now that I’ve spent a lot of time in operations and the cloud. I feel like I really know how to host, maintain and deploy a project with some tricks up my sleeve. I just need to transition more into building the code for one now. Time will tell, I guess.

talks and demonstrations

Before the pandemic, I made the most of my opportunities to give some talks and demos on a series of topics, ranging from tech to audio. Below are some nice summaries of things I spoke about.

2018, Continuous Integration Practices Rising from my project work on developing a CI pipeline for a C++ framework using CMake, I gave a live coding tutorial reflecting on continuous integration, notably on how it could be combined with more computer intensive research. This was an independent initiative that addressed a gap in a trending technology and led to interest from a broad range of participants.

2018, “Git Poetry” To better my collegues’ understanding of version-control techniques, I gave a live git demonstration on good practices for version control for collaborative workflow. As a result, I feel more confident about pushing changes within a collabo- rative environment. This is summarised in my blog post, https://williamdunstanmorris.github.io//gitflow-techniques.html

2018, CVSSP 30th Anniversary - Can Machines Think? Ran my own demo stand for industry leaders in computer vision, speech and signal processing, an exploration into our- project’s object-based audio VSTs - the first ever open-source object-based VST eco-system for audio. You can see the program for this here.

2020, Observability for Web Services

languages

• I got into programming through Max/MSP and SuperCollider
• I really love Terraform. I’ve written tonnes of it to provision resources in AWS. It has made AWS so much less overwhelming.
• Written small scripts and sysops tasks with Python
• Written and collaborated on software with C++ and Java
• I prefer zsh over fish.
• I’m learning Golang! Specifically, microservices with Golang. I’ve found it hard to find a language that I really liked, but I think that this is the language I really want to master eventually.
• I tried some wordpress development with PHP for Wordpress too. That was actually pretty fun.
• I prefer the Macbook trackpads and screen resolution, but I spend a lot of time on Linux. So I use both.

skills, buzz-words and the tool soup

Communication & leadership

• Helping build a North * Engineering based on SOLID and observable 12-factor
• Comprehension of low level tasks management performance KIs (key insights)
• I believe in diplomacy as an engineer
• i believe successful engineering projects are constructed via well documented approaches that address the core objective and key insights from the top down.

SysOps and Site Reliability

• Experience building SEV-1 response protocols
• Experience responding to SEV-1 response protocols (on call experience)
• Deployed and maintained (Ansible) 3+ EC2 VM agents for CI/CD.

Cloud (AWS) I have a huge amount of hands on experience working with AWS. It would take a long time to describe how I came into contact with every single one of these services, but in a nutshell:

• Creating regional VPCs, routing tables, private and public subnets
• EC2: EC2, EIPs, AMI, Snapshots, Volumes, application load balancers, target groups
• IAM, Whitelisting Roles, AWS Organizations (great for environment mapping!)
• Autoscaling launch configurations
• Security groups, self referencing security groups
• ECS, ECR, CodeDeploy
• Creating ECS clusters for EC2 and ECS Fargate
• Application Load Balancing and Target Groups
• AWS Backup
• IAM Role and policy management via least privilege approach
• RDS Postgres
• Elasticache Redis

Terraform Using modularised terraform, I have:

• Deploying stateless container application models (API)
• Deploying serverless application models (API)
• Deploying content delivery distribution and origins architecture (Website)
• Deploying and owning a custom internal on-premise CI/CD platform architecture (TeamCity) for multiple engineering teams.
• Deployed and own an internal on-premise Grafana for 4 teams

additional experience

English Teacher, British Institute of Rome, 2016 Acquired a CELTA teaching qualification, built up teaching skills and acquired a modest understanding of spoken Italian.

Activities Manager, Education First, Brighton, 2015 Organised and managed staff and activities leaders, managing budgets and events in venues across Brighton and south-east England.

references

• Dr Philip P Jackson, Reader in Machine Audition, University of Surrey, GU27XH p.jackson@surrey.ac.uk
• Professor Adrian Hilton, Director of CVSSP, University of Surrey, GU27XH a.hilton@surrey.ac.uk