I’m from Dublin, Ireland having returned at the end of 2010 after 8 years abroad, 5 in Glasgow (Scotland) and 3 in Lyon (France). I’ve recently started a new company, Whiteley Tech Ltd. (http://whiteleytech.ie) with my Wife, offering FOSS consulting, development and support as well as game QA project management with our business Gametango (http://gametango.com).

I’ve used Linux since 1997…ish… a few months before starting University where I did Computer Science at UCD (http://ucd.ie). It’s all a bit hazy, but my cold turkey cut-off from the land of Windows happened in 2002 when I moved to Glasgow and bought my first laptop, a Sony Vaio which had a 20GB HDD and didn’t lend itself to dual booting, so I went with SuSE and gave Windows the heave-ho. I used SuSE mainly due to lack of internet in those days where the DVD was the only way to go but eventually progressed onto Gentoo and ran that for over 3 years. After the incessant pimping of Ubuntu I finally switched to Kubuntu (yes KDE is the only way to go I’m afraid) and have been a happy user ever since!

I am more a system admin than a developer but I’ve been developing a Nagios/Shinken based monitoring and management system for 3+ years which manages over 160 sites, 300 servers, 200 routers and 26000+ users at a School Council in Scotland. I’ve worked for over 5 years running IT at a multilingual/multisite contact centre where there was a mix of Windows/Cisco/Linux and ACD systems where high uptime and stress were the rule of the day.

Rugby is the only true sport and when I’m not putting people to sleep with my FLOSS rants I’m shouting at/for Leinster and Ireland.