Toby Sear

I was given the opportunity to become a team leader at a very early point in my career, I am glad to say that I was able to successfully recruit and lead technical development teams on complex web application builds at my previous roles. Where possible, I try to practice participative leadership as much as possible, ensuring my team are informed and have the opportunity to contribute to the decision-making process.

Working in the web application space has consistently presented interesting challenges to me and my development teams. Knowing how to approach a challenge is key to getting it resolved quickly, I have the ability to take a wider viewpoint when resolving challenges, understanding what is trying to be achieved and approaching the problem from different directions.

Having built a development team at a Management Consultancy I have experienced polar opposites when it comes to how teams work together. Knowing how to communicate well with your team as well as your clients and other teams around you is the key to being a team leader. I have worked hard to ensure I can effectively communicate in both of these worlds in addition to successfully communicating with other team leaders and our clients.

Managing your time as a team leader can often be difficult, it's easy to fall into a trap of constantly attending meetings or preparing for your next meeting. Knowing how to prioritise your time, delegate to members of your team as well as optimise time spent in meetings are key to handling a busy leadership workload.

I have been working with Linux servers for around 20 years, I have primarily settled on Debian or Debian derived distributions, although I am comfortable working with any modern operating system.

I am comfortable working with modern web servers in a variety of configurations, I am able to suggest or recommend an appropriate technology which would perform best based on your existing or proposed solution.

I have primarily worked with AWS to provide cloud services, although I have some experience working with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. My AWS experience covers a wide range of services across EC2, ELB, ASG, S3, SageMaker, Textract and many more

I have been working with Puppet in large-scale environments since version 4 was released in 2015. I also have experience with Ansible which I prefer to use for small or temporary solutions. I am very keen on solutions that minimise direct human interaction with hosting infrastructure, preferring the reliable and repeatable approach of automation tools.

My main focus has been on infrastructure for hosting large data-driven web applications most frequently written in PHP, however, I have experience building and managing solutions for Node.js as well as some more limited experience with hosting Python based solutions.

Due to the scale of the projects I have worked on in recent years, I have experience working with a range of database technologies from the fairly standard MySQL/MariaDB solutions to fairly complex multi-master columnstores. I also have plenty of experience working with key-value stores such as redis.

I have been working with build environments to run build processes and asset compilation since around 2012, giving me plenty of experience with debugging various build tools and working with developers on fine-tuning build processes.

I have been working with ELK/EFK stack solutions since 2016. Centralised logging is a key component to minimising time spent fault-finding and is vital in the world of disposable infrastructure.