Rich Robinson

Hard working individual who puts great passion and enthusiasm into all their work. Very capable of working both individually and as part of a team and has great communication and personal skills to be able to drive collaborative working and strive for the best solution possible. Also a very capable individual and fast learner who is passionate about wanting to know more in order to better them self and be helpful to others. Capable of learning both independently utilising the internet, but also through more formal methods such as online learning platforms and classroom environments.

Selection of major project experience

These are examples of new products which I have been involved in setting up.

• June 2017 to June 2018 - Luminate Traffic Management System - Creation and delivery of the company's first Traffic Management system which fully integrates into the live Signal Control system. I worked as an Infrastructure Engineer to setup both the physical on-prem systems, as well as managing the Infrastructure as Code to build the Docker stack and supporting pipelines for product release as well as the setup of Development and Test cloud-based environments.
• May 2016 to July 2017 - Luminous Training System - Creation of a fully virtualised version of the live product (Scalable) for use by the customer in a offline environment for the purpose of training staff. This product utilised Microsoft HyperV for the virtualisation, Powershell for reproducible creation of virtual machines, Ansible to drive an automated process to reconfigure the system for multiple geographical areas.

Rich has been supporting these products ever since.

Selection of minor project experience

These are examples of work delivered for existing products within the standard releases cycles, but they introduced substantial changes to the existing product.

• November 2023 to November 2024 (on-going) - Luminate - Re-mobilisation of major upgrade work to base operating system and Docker. On-boarding new colleagues onto the team and acting in a more senior role and guiding them, utilising my domain knowledge and past experience of the work completed so far. Together this lead to a much improved approach for deployment to production sites which culminated with the successful delivery to a production location. The project is on-going in the preparation of the delivery to another production location.
• November 2022 to November 2023 (on-going) - Scalable - Modernising this legacy application/platform to run upon a more modern operating system driven by changes in the underlying hardware requirements. Phase one is to re-host the application code from a custom Linux OS from early 2000s to RedHat 9 so as to minimise impact, risk and reach a customer deadline. Phase two will explore more options to fully modernise the platform which may involve a combination of re-hosting, re-platforming and refactoring to bring the application code up to the latest versions of languages/frameworks.
• October 2021 to August 2022 - Luminate - Major upgrade of base operating system. Upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. Refactoring the system configuration and auto installer configuration for transition from Preseed and the Debian Installer to Cloud-init and the Subiquity installer. Also enhanced the process by creating a custom local APT repo on the installation media to facilitate live updates to the systems in the future.
• December 2020 to September 2021 - Scalable - Major upgrade of base operating system. Refactoring existing scripting and configuration to work with after the transition from System V to SystemD. Also re-implemented many aspects to used more formally supported methods rather than brute force custom methods.
• February 2020 to April 2020 - Scalable - Centralised Client Deployment Process - Enhancing the power of Ansible to live update the client systems within the Scalable product and avoiding the un-necessary need to re-install the entire operating system. This effectively reduced the deployment time of minor changes by 75%.
• September 2019 to February 2020 - Luminate - Refactoring the existing Infrastructure as Code to enhance the segregation & compartmentialisation to allow for greater flexibility and reusability when building the Docker stack and to support delivery to multiple customers.