Ex-Web Developer / I.T. Contractor - Soon To Be A Professional Brewer

Current Status: Brewer in Training

I am very passionate about craft beer and am working tirelessly towards establishing our own craft beer brewery in my wife's hometown in rural Japan.

I was a skilled Wintel Infrastructure specialist with experience covering an array of technologies. My expertise lay within the realm of web servers/services, however I am exceptionally versatile and could add value to any scenario.

My main strengths are that I am a workhorse, I love to investigate and solve complex problems and I communicate very well. Equally capable of collaborating within a team or powering on under my own initiative, I thrive under pressure and love to be challenged!

Additionally, I enjoyed streamlining processes by introducing automation through the creation of scripts, desktop or web applications where appropriate and to facilitate this I was constantly expanding my programming/scripting language portfolio.

Education

2020 - 2023 PgCert Brewing and Distilling Heriot-Watt University

2007 - 2011 MA (Hons) Japanese - 2:1 The University of Edinburgh

Experience

March 2025 ~
Board Member and Co-founder Brewshido Co. Ltd.

My role for Brewshido will be head of production, or head brewer. We established our company in March and are working hard to build our brewery and launch our brand.

May 2022 ~ May 2025
Regional Revitalisation Scheme Member Hidaka Village Hall

Working for the village hall to help revitalise the village. I was working under a "Free Mission" contract with the stated goal to establish a craft beer brewery in the village.

This contract included a year long internship at another brewery, the completion of my postgraduate biochemistry and microbiology course, much research, searching for land, creating a business plan, organising funding, meeting other brewers and craft beer specialist bar owners, and building a community.

Jan 2012 ~ Feb 2022
Web Services Technical Analyst - Contract The Royal Bank of Scotland Group

Wintel web infrastructure projects resource assigned to the eBanking Programme. The position involves configuring and building IIS servers as well as testing and deploying web application build changes within test and production enviroments

May 2012 ~ Feb 2020
Director Hatamoto Solutions Ltd.

Established and managed my own I.T. consultancy & web development company.

Sep 2011 ~ Dec 2011
Web Services Technician - Contract The Royal Bank of Scotland Group

Wintel web infrastructure projects resource assigned to the FiRST Programme. The position involved configuring proxy servers and building, configuring IIS servers.

2011 (as required)
Web Developer Kawaii Companions (www.kawaiicompanions.com)

Interpreted graphical briefs to create a 'magical experience'. Customised vBulletin Forum, Facebook Fan Page, Ebay Store, Backend Design, Japanese Translation and SEO Management

2009 (as required)
I.T. Administrator \ Web Developer RL Rose Ltd. (www.rlroseltd.com)

Infrastructure Assessment and Optimisation, Infrastructure Upgrade Proposal, Website Restructure, Dynamic Backend Driven PHP Site Design, Creation of In-house CMS.

2008 (as required)
Web Developer \ SEO Manager Research is Cool (www.researchiscool.com)

Designed and developed a postgraduate jobs and courses search site. Created custom search engine and social networking elements allowing members to join groups and communicate with each other.

Jun 2004 ~ Mar 2007
Senior Technical Specialist (3rd Level) \ Technical Design Authority The Royal Bank of Scotland Group

Specialising in web server infrastructure, supporting ~1200+ web servers. Involved in project planning, technical design & implementation sign off. Initially configured and tested RBS's first in-house Google installation. Designed and developed desktop and web applications, saving the company thousands of man hours.

Aug 2002 ~ Jun 2004
Technical Analyst (2nd Level) \ Team Leader The Royal Bank of Scotland Group

Supported infrastructure incidents for Intranet, Oracle, Microsoft SMS, Wintel File & Print, Unix, Messaging, Networking and Backup & Restore. Managed and designed the team web sites. Primary staff trainer and served as team leader for 9 months.

Sep 2001 ~ Aug 2002
Technical Helpdesk Analyst (1st Level) The Royal Bank of Scotland Group

1st level support of internal telephony, networking and mainframe. 3rd level liaison with commercial clients using the SWIFT system. When the team role was transferred to another location I performed the training of the new team, including full procedural documentation.

Skills

Web Technologies
  • Apache
  • IIS (4,5,6,8.5)
  • Oracle 9iAS
  • HTML5 / CSS3
  • PHP
  • JavaScript
  • JQuery
  • AJAX
  • XML
  • XSLT
  • C#
  • PL/SQL
  • VBScript
  • Perl
  • Site Server 3.0
  • FPSE
  • Wordpress
  • Drupal
  • OSCommerce
  • Magento
  • Nginx
  • Python
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Gitea
  • Webmentions
  • microformats
  • micropub/sub
  • Docker
  • DroneCI
  • Go
  • LetsEncrypt/Certbot
  • Nextcloud
  • Pleroma
  • Mastodon
  • Friendica
  • Prosody(XMPP)
  • Matrix Synapse
  • Grafana
  • Prometheus
  • GoToSocial
  • Dendrite
Operating Systems
  • Windows (95,NT,XP,Vista,7,10)
  • Windows Server (2000,2003,2008 R2,2012 R2)
  • Linux (Red Hat, OpenSuse, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, PureOS, Manjaro)
  • Unix
Desktop Software
  • GIMP
  • Inkscape
  • Scribus
  • Flash
  • Dreamweaver
  • Virtual Studio Code
  • Atom
  • Hugo
RDBMS
  • Oracle
  • MS SQL
  • MySQL/MariaDB
  • PostGreSQL
Others
  • IBM Websphere
  • Business Objects
  • Veritas BackupExec
  • Legato Networker
  • Legato Replistor
  • Tivoli
  • Compaq RiB
  • MS SMS
  • PCAnywhere
  • Clustering
  • SSL Certificates
  • DNS
  • Virtualisation (ESXi/VMWare)
  • Dreamweaver
  • Virtual Studio Code
  • Atom
  • Hugo