Meet the Herd: Paul Jones

Hi Paul! Tell us a bit about yourself.

In a word – Geek. I am the epitome of an “IT Geek.”  I grew up with computers from an early age and continued to make them a huge focus in my life from school to university and beyond. Outside of work I am very engaged with computer gaming but also enjoy a lot of hobbies and past times that take me away from interacting with a computer screen. I am a huge science fiction and fantasy lover and avid reader. I play Dungeons and Dragons and Tabletop Wargames (Warhammer) with friends and run a gaming club at a local community association of which I am also the treasurer.

Outside of technology, I enjoy the outdoors, I love going hiking and camping, aiming for at least one 4 hour hike a month to keep fit and de-stress. When the warmer weather arrives, I enjoy wild camping as well. Nothing beats waking up in a hammock in the middle of a forest! I have canoed the River Spey in Scotland and have my DSC 1 qualification for deer management in the UK.

Prior to working as a Cloud Engineer, I was a Secondary and 6th Form Teacher for 10 years across schools in the Northeast. My subject specialisms were IT, Computer Science and Graphic Communication. I also ran the Duke of Edinburgh program in two of the schools I worked at. This was an incredibly rewarding but immensely challenging career – there is nothing quite like working with teenagers from all levels of society!

What is your role at BlakYaks?

Currently I am engaged with the BlakYaks SpecOps team whose role is the development and continuous support for our client’s cloud environments and workloads. The role is quite varied and involves a mixture of everything from planning and designing workload infrastructure in a cloud-centric method, to continuous front-line support and troubleshooting of any issues that may arise from day-to-day operation of said environments, to disaster recovery. As part of this role, I interact with a number of different tools and technologies related to cloud engineering, such as Infrastructure as Code through Terraform and Ansible, CLI tools such as Azure CLI and scripting languages including Bash, PowerShell, and others.

What does a typical day look like for you and what are you currently working on?

Each day can be quite varied here at BlakYaks, it is highly dependent on the client I am engaged with and the specific projects I am working on for said client. We have regular meetings with our client liaisons and project managers and Outlook and Teams remain two key technologies we rely on for communication.

Apart from our regular meetings and communications with our clients, my day revolves around service requests and project work. Service requests involve responding to questions or requests to add to or adapt an existing workload. As an example, I recently supported delivering an enterprise level password management solution (Delinea Secret Server) and am currently adapting that deployment to improve its functionality. The service requests can involve using Terraform, Git and Azure DevOps to deploy updates to infrastructure, or they could involve accessing cloud VMs to diagnose, investigate and resolve issues.

Project work is highly dependent on what the client has requested BlakYaks to work on. I have recently been involved in both a production level deployment of Veeam Backup into the cloud and a migration of IBMs DOORS and DOORS NEXT software from a legacy on premises hosted solution, across to a cloud centric approach. Such project work also involves writing terraform code using VS Code as the IDE and the using Git and Azure DevOps to evaluate and deploy the code via pipelines. Each day can be quite different, but all are engaging and enjoyable.

What drew you to join BlakYaks originally?

BlakYaks were (and are) working with the tools and cloud technologies that I had started to engage with at my previous employment. Technologies such as Terraform are central to the approach BlakYaks take to Cloud Engineering and their focus on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform was an area I wanted to gain more exposure to.

Working at a smaller company also appealed to me as I wanted to feel less like a nameless resource in a large company and be one of a smaller, more focused team of people who knew each other well and interacted with each other a lot more often.

How did you find the onboarding process when you joined BlakYaks?

Different – at least for me. BlakYaks was the first company I onboarded with after the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns in the UK. This, coupled with the fact that BlakYaks were also the first company I joined whose central office was more than a 30-minute drive from where I live (Northeast England) meant that everything was remote.

My line manager and other senior leadership at BlakYaks made the process quick, easy, and painless. Each dedicated a large amount of their time over the first week to ensure I had all the tools and technologies installed and configured correctly on my work laptop (which had arrived before my start date) and to ensure I felt welcome. It was a positive and relaxed experience, which helped overcome a lot of worries I had about starting with a company where I wasn’t able to easily visit the office.

What advice would you give to recent new joiners?

Embrace the culture here. Do not be afraid to ask questions and access the huge amount of documentation and guidance we have developed. Get involved with the different projects – even if it’s just shadowing someone to see what they are working on and what tools they are using. Make use of the training schemes that BlakYaks have as well, upskilling is key!

How has the company/team changed since you joined?

Its grown quite a lot! We have more graduate students joining us regularly and have moved offices once while I have been with the company. I have moved teams as well, from the Professional Services team to the SpecOps team. We have started collaborating with more clients and have made strong inroads into developing the BlakYaks IP.

How do you find BlakYaks’ flexible working model?

Its brilliant, it really helps balance work and home life. It is a two-way street at BlakYaks, you give your all and when home life sometimes gets in the way you are easily able to work around it. I do not think I could go back to working in a more rigid style!

What are your goals and aspirations for the next 6 months?

I would love to improve my skills and knowledge to the extent that I can be considered a Senior Cloud Engineer, and I would like to be someone known within the company who can support people with any issues they have.  I’d like to be able to take the lead on a project and I am aiming to complete several additional industry recognised certifications such as AZ-700, CKS, to improve my skillset.

What do you like most about BlakYaks?

The smaller size of the company. It feels lot more like a group of friends than a company. And it makes asking for help or support a lot easier. The people here are incredibly helpful and knowledgeable. We have good relationships with our clients, they know we are an incredibly industrious group of people with a vast amount of expertise.