I am an unashmed relic of a bygone time before the commoditisation of ICT.

I have gone back to system design, architecture and engineering for a start up. I am looking to pass on my backend server and distributed systems knowledge to the start up where I have joined the board.

This is after 17 years as a corporate strategist, punctated by a year in the Bay Area as a VP in a famous global tech.

I had a 10 year career as a transaction processing specialsit on Digial Equipment Co platforms (DEC ---a DEC Head)

I was invovled as a sofware engineer, dbms engineer, designer aat a large construction company in a programmer culture that included acedemics on staff, to learn the art of software engineering. We took turns as system programmers, system managers and DBA's of a large cap.

Then as engineer and chief architect designed who desinged and coded large national finanical trading systems for worlds top 10 markets. Our teams built very high reliability, performance and availibity in these masssively distributed asynchronous systems that are still running markets at orders of magnitude higher volumes than the degisn targets, decades later on the infrastructure now owned by HP and Oracle.

We were believers in theoretical soundness up the stack from the OS to appliaction layers, and rejected artificial complexity at all levels of the architecture.

So I am one of those folks who successfully built the $100m + systems that no CEO will sign a cheque for today because 95+% of attempts fail.