Andrew Southall

Award Winning Engineer

Solo Technologist | Investor | Mad Cunt

Queries

My latest article and a sample of my previous projects are featured below. I'm always open to worthwhile ventures, so please get in touch!

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Latest Article

directorystore
forgerock
ldap
business
architecture

Cigars et al.

Lightspeed ¶ A couple of years ago I started smoking cigars more often and they’ve turned out to be one of the genuinely enjoyable things in life - one of those small, civilised pleasures that makes the whole enterprise feel worth it. That wasn’t always the case. I’d tried cigars when I was younger and they never really connected with me. At the time, the downsides - and yes, obviously there are downsides - didn’t seem worth it.

All Articles

SkySiege

SkySiege is the extended commercial release of a selection of tools I developed during my consulting career. SkySiege provides the fastest cybersecurity analysis and testing services in the industry built from my personal experiences engaging with various clients across various states of maturity.
Whenever I started a project I used the SkySiege tools to get an immediate and complete understanding a clients estate, letting me triage and react to what were often dangerous problems.

SkySiege is one of the new, great cybersecurity firms.
Become a customer and get grandfathered into the best cybersecurity services available!

Verizon

Verizon needed someone who could run the creation, development and management of an in house security application that quantified their global Attack Surface. I built that application, added scalable penetration testing and rolled it out as part of their penetration testing process for all applications going through technical product development. By the time it was part of their standard operations it had discovered millions of Verison domains and had tested tens of thousands of known and unknown services.

Volvo UK

Volvo UK were looking for input on how to manage their delivery process. Bogged down by ill-fitting Agile processes, opinionated tooling and facing an aggressive change schedule, they needed clarity on how to tackle the challenges ahead of them.
The solution was simple.
Split the process and tooling to cover two elements, the technical workspace and the business visibility. The technical workspace feeds into business visibility at a single boundary. The business can view the macro activity it understands and the technical team get the space to work as they need without an overbearing process.
This advice came as part of services provided by WeShape which won Best DevOps Services Firm (Computing DevOps Excellence Awards 2023).

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Computing DevOps Excellence Awards - Best DevOps Services Firm

De Beers Tracr Blockchain Platform

The Tracr platform uniquely identifies diamonds using Machine Learning algorithms, commits them to an Ethereum Blockchain and tracks their ownership forever. The project had ran for four years without launching as the project had no viable infrastructure, no release plans and no route to live.
Within just 6 months I had led a team of three DevOps engineers to rebuild every environment, create pipelines, issue certificate authorities, develop custom tools and deploy the blockchain and platform. Tracr loaded hundreds of thousands of diamonds in the first week of launch.
Tracr earned a spot on Forbes Blockchain 50 with an estimated worth of over 1 billion USD.
My work was provided by WeShape as a flagship project for Best Services Company of the Year (UK IT Industry Awards) & Best DevOps Consulting Firm (Computing DevOps Excellence Awards 2022), winning both awards.

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Forbes Blockchain 50
UK IT Industry Awards - Best Services Company of the Year 2022
Computing DevOps Excellence Awards - Best DevOps Consulting Firm

10x Banking

10x Banking is a modern Banking-as-a-Service provider creating new retail and commercial banks running on cloud technology. They provide the platform for Westpac's BaaS operations in Australia and Chase Bank's retail operations in the UK.
I rebuilt the release process and data migrations for all customer and colleague identity systems. I performed deployments and updates for every environment and built custom tools for managing builds across the globe serving millions of customers and multiple banking clients.
I performed all data migrations for all environments including production. I performed the pre-live data migration for Chase Bank UK on video conference for C-Level Executives covering all customers and Chase colleagues.
I spent a few years with 10x and left for paternity leave. My code and documentation are still about, give it a read if Helm is causing issues again.

HSBC Open Banking

I worked in Global Open Banking providing APIs with full banking functionality to trusted third party providers under Open Banking and PSD2 legislation. This covered systems across Europe, the US, Hong Kong, Mexico, Australia and more.
I securely ran over 40 AWS accounts across 5 AWS regions. I built our serverless security monitoring platform in Go and Python. I lead a team of 12 in launching a Go based reverse proxy fronting twelve European banking brands as part of MCI requirements. I had built the prototype myself and prepped most of production myself.
I also deployed a last minute release for develop.hsbc.com from a coach to Stansted. Open Banking was interesting.

Commercial Projects

My experience has lead me to design, build and retail commercial software as an independent developer. You can read more about services such as InstantCloud and SecureMachines at trulydigital.net

Open Source Projects

Outside of direct client work I build tools. These tools are useful for both my consultancy and my own products yet do not hold commercial value themselves. Thus they're freely available without warranty as open source projects.
They include Prometheus exporters, templating tools, cloud GUI replacements and more.
Additionally, my base Docker images and builds are available for use via DockerHub.
Open Source is a good thing, I'm happy to pull my weight and pitch back. Full documentation for Jinny including all its custom filters, functions and more can be found at the Jinny documentation site. The entire documentation page is open source and a single compiled HTML page managed by Jinny!

Certifications

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