👨🏻‍💻 About me

My name is Dave Barker and I'm a software engineer from Glasgow, working as a Computer Officer[1] in a university[2] computing department. I've worked in IT professionally since the mid-2000s, in a variety of software engineering and sysadmin roles but I've been interested in computing since I was a kid (learning to program on early home computers like the Commodore C64, Atari ST and Amiga A500). I'm a Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (MIET) and the Association for Computing Machinery.

I'm interested in pragmatic, minimalist software engineering, cybersecurity, embedded systems, Linux, and OSS. I've worked with a pretty wide range of programming languages over the years.

In my spare time I enjoy gaming, travel and photography.

💼 About my current role

I currently work as a Computer Officer in a university CS department. My team look after all the computer systems for the department and the wider Faculty of Science. Day to day, that looks like managing lab computers, desktop computing estate, server and network infrastructure and all the services we use for teaching, research and student projects (like GitLab, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, in-house PaaS, virtualisation platforms and cloud systems like M365). In addition to our IT operations work (providing a secure and stable platform for teaching, research and collaboration in the department), my team provide expert software engineering support, helping academic colleagues and students turn their ideas into concrete tech implementations and debug the more gnarly bugs they encounter in their work and studies.

🕸️ About this site

I'm a big fan of the small web (pre social media internet where websites were largely static, text-based and very individual). This is my little contribution to keeping the small web alive, and sharing some of the knowledge and thoughts I have developed on technology over the years.

🏗️ How this site is built

I'm building this site using using Lume - a fantastic static site generator (SSG) for Deno, using the Vento template engine.

Lume uses the wonderful markdown-it parser, and I'm using the markdown-it-mark and markdown-it-footnote plugins on this site.

📧 Contact me

You can email me at dave @ this domain.

  1. In the FE/HE world, a Computer Officer is sort of one-stop-shop, generalist sysadmin / software engineering role at the department or faculty level. ↩︎

  2. The words on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer. I'm writing the content here entirely in my own capacity and not as part of my job, but as my day job is in IT and this is an IT-focussed blog, there will naturally be some overlap. ↩︎