Hi, I’m Lloyd.

I’m a nerd at heart. I always have been.

I wrote my first iOS app at school when I was 13. I remember being genuinely excited about my first visit to a data centre. I built my own computers, took tools apart to see how they worked, and eventually started writing real apps and websites for real businesses. That drive never went away.

What I’ve done.

Over the last 10 years I’ve worked across almost every layer of tech. At Future PLC I worked on serious infrastructure, from private dark fibre to Pure Storage. At GoCompare I helped lead the move from on-premise to Azure for a £350m+ business, and I’ve worked with Admiral too. Along the way I’ve deployed to every cloud you could name, from AWS, Azure and GCP to Hetzner and DigitalOcean.

Today I’m the Lead DevOps Engineer at Autodarts, answering directly to Nodor on scale, security and uptime. I moved the platform to a new cloud, built the self-hosted Kubernetes platform it runs on, set up the monitoring and incident management, and got it through its penetration tests. I also built the back office the team uses to run the platform, and the firmware for Autodarts X, a multimillion-pound investment for Nodor, from the embedded Linux build to the over-the-air updates.

I hate to say it, but there isn’t much in tech from the last 10 years I haven’t touched. It’s a big part of why clients trust me with their decisions.

What I’m into now.

AI has taken me to a level of knowledge I never thought I’d have. Everything I’ve learnt over the last decade now moves about ten times faster.

And I’ve found a new excitement for design. I’m not a designer, but I’ve always wanted to understand good UX and how things look and feel, so that’s what I’m learning. I can’t leave something alone until it works and looks right. There are features in Merrin, my own product for FCA compliance teams, that I’ve rewritten for days until I was happy.

Outside work.

Other people finish work and switch on the Xbox. I open Merrin, or start on the next idea.

Working with me.

I work with a few clients at a time, some of them for more than five years. They pay me by the hour for whatever they need, whether that’s engineering or advice, and trust me to run projects on my own, lead the calls about their apps and help make the technology decisions for their business. Lately most of that work is AI portals: a company’s systems and data connected in one place, so their teams can get answers and act without waiting on anyone.