Career Profile
Hi, Matt Spurrier here. ICT Specialist and Founder of SenseICT Pty Ltd
ICT (Information & Communications Technology) is a tricky field to work in.
Technology is ever changing with new and improved best practices, constant security vulnerabilities, government policy changes, and a myriad of other factors.
Some businesses don’t ‘get’ why they should invest in ICT; It’s just too complicated they say. Why should they spend a bunch of money each month on commonly intangible assets, especially when things are seemingly working fine as they are.
The answer to this question is somewhat simple:
Investing in ICT allows you to stay ahead of your competition, improve your business workflow, and decrease overall expenses with automation.
Whether you’re just starting out, or a hugely successful conglomerate, ICT is key to 21st-century business.
I work with businesses to help them improve their businesses through technology.
Having over 15 years of experience in ICT and working with a wide variety of businesses worldwide, I am well aware of the difficulties and complexities businesses face in today’s ever-evolving world.
I’ve commonly come across issues such as business downtime due to ICT failures; antiquated systems no longer fit for purpose; and poor quality work from former ICT staff. However, without ICT in today’s business, significant unseen expenses remain very real.
I get it, we’re human and we all make mistakes, there’s no denying that, but what if we didn’t have to make as many mistakes by digitizing and automating procedures.
I believe every business, whether big or small, should be using ICT to improve their business while keeping things relatively simple.
If you’re interested in improving your communications and technology systems and getting the most out of your business, hit the connect button and get in contact.
You can also check out the SenseICT website at senseict.com.au to see the full list of services I offer.
Experiences
SenseICT is dedicated to staying at the cutting edge, providing and supporting our clients with the latest cost-effective and proven technologies, without having to invest heavily in your own internal ICT teams to build and maintain your solutions.
I work with businesses to help them improve their businesses through technology.
Having over 15 years of experience in ICT and working with a wide variety of businesses worldwide, I am well aware of the difficulties and complexities businesses face in today’s ever-evolving world.
I’ve commonly come across issues such as business downtime due to ICT failures; antiquated systems no longer fit for purpose; and poor quality work from former ICT staff. However, without ICT in today’s business, significant unseen expenses remain very real.
I get it, we’re human and we all make mistakes, there’s no denying that, but what if we didn’t have to make as many mistakes by digitizing and automating procedures.
I believe every business, whether big or small, should be using ICT to improve their business while keeping things relatively simple.
If you’re interested in improving your communications and technology systems and getting the most out of your business, hit the connect button and get in contact.
You can also check out the SenseICT website at senseict.com.au to see the full list of services I offer.
As the Systems Administrator with Moodle I was responsible for all aspects of the internal and external ICT operations including but not limited to local ICT support & desktop management, internal network, routing, DNS, and our externally hosted network of servers providing our hosting environments for various mission critical sites and tools used within the development life-cycle and Moodle community as a whole.
Moodle was a fantastic challenge, being able to put my current skills and knowledge too good use, while furthering my skills and knowledge base in new existing technologies. Utilising technologies such as Puppet with configuration version control management via Git, and Zabbix as an internal monitoring solution, Moodle went from a completely unmaintainable network with no configuration management, change management, audit trail, or real documentation, to a network that was easy to manage and monitor from a single point.
Access controls went from being manually rolled out SSH keys to arbitrarily issued system accounts with undocumented and unmaintainable levels of permissions, to a structured authentication and access control provided by LDAP (OpenLDAP with custom auto-group patches to allow for posix and non-posix ACL auto- group assignments).
Server access went from publicly available SSH, to restricted access lists with SoftEther VPN.
Creating a secure VPN (authenticated via LDAP) also allowed our internal-use only sites to be restricted to IP ranges, preventing search engine crawling and caching, as well as other prying eyes from interfering with internal operations.
Moodle’s systems were migrated from their old unmaintained CentOS environment to a new Puppet controlled, monitored, Ubuntu based physical environment.
Whilst building infrastructure for the Learn Moodle MOOC (Massively-Open Online Course) in 2013 I gained experience in setting up dynamic load balanced cluster environments utilising technologies such as Puppet, Zabbix, Percona XtraDB Cluster (Multi-master MySQL w/InnoDB and Galera), Gluster, NginX, and HAProxy MySQL TCP Balancing.
I also worked autonomously from home, providing 24/7 support as required.
I gained experience in public speaking, preparing and delivering a speech to delegates at the Moodle MOOT in Melbourne in 2013, in addition to networking with the MOOT delegates.
I gained and furthered my knowledge and experience with the following technologies:
Puppet; Zabbix; SoftEther; NginX; Apache 2.2-2.4+ with mod_ruid2; PHP5.3-5.5+; Gluster; Percona XtraDB Cluster (InnoDB, Gluster); MySQL; BASH Scripting; OpenLDAP, BackupPC; Git & GitLab; Tomcat; Atlassian JIRA; Atlassian Crowd; Atlassian Confluence, and a range of others.
During my time at Squiz my role was as a Systems Administrator within the support team, I worked on a rotating roster with the Australian team covering 12 hours of a 24 hour service generally supporting clients of Squiz’s flagship product ‘Squiz (MySource) Matrix’.
My job included general Linux server management (set-up, updates, security patching and maintenance, etc.), product debugging & problem resolution, liaising with the development team to diagnose, fix, and patch against product bugs, documentation, liaising with clients, etc.
In addition to my administrative role, my passion for PHP development lead me to diagnosing and fixing bugs, as well as the addition of new features and tools for the product.
A major part of the sys-admin role within support was working from home, being on call on a regular basis, and working during public holidays to support our clients as best as possible.