Joel Merrick

Hello, I'm Joel.

I live in Lancaster and I’ve been building and running infrastructure for about twenty years: servers, then clouds, then Kubernetes, and a lot of build pipelines along the way.

What I'm up to now

• Day job Platform engineering and DevOps, usually leading it: cloud platforms built as code on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD and monitoring, sometimes as a permanent lead and sometimes as a contractor.
• Also CTO of Spectrum Dynamics CIC, a small social enterprise. I built SpektraBot, a guidance tool for families, carers and professionals finding their way through the SEND system.
• Tinkering Dummy Run, an open-source tool where AI personas try out your app in a real browser before your customers do.

Pages

• Weather, live........................................160
• CV, the long version........................................200
• Articles........................................300
  • Dummy Run: letting fictional users try your app first........................................304
  • Taming the Wild West of MCP Security........................................303
  • My Code in the Arctic........................................302
  • Chef to Ansible Converter: AI-Powered Migration Tool........................................301
• Speaking........................................400
• Contact........................................500
• Fun and games........................................600

From the archive

Before all that I spent five years at BBC R&D, building and running the private cloud, build systems and configuration management the researchers depended on, and keeping the network up for live events along the way.

In 2013 I gave a talk at OpenNebula in Berlin (page 400). Some of my open-source code is now in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault (page 302).

Say hello

The easiest way to reach me is email: [email protected]. I’m joelio on GitHub.

Open to advisory work.