Matthew Seaman: Curriculum Vitæ

Personal Details

Full Name:	Dr. Matthew John Seaman, MA(Oxon), D.Phil	Address:	Flat 3 7 Priory Courtyard Ramsgate Kent CT11 9PW
Nationality:	British
Marital Status:	Single
Contact Details:		Tel:	+44 (0)1843 580647
Contact Details:		E-mail:	m.seaman@black-earth.co.uk

Skills Summary

System Architect: Infrastructure Design and Installation: Logical and physical design of server infrastructure. Taking a development scale prototype and turning it into a production system. Building in resilience. Design for scale-up and scale-out. From the ground up where necessary: specification of machine rooms; including power supply, physical security, fire suppression, air conditioning; up to the design, specification and implementation of Enterprise Level IT Systems. High Availability and Load Balanced Architectures. System Integration. Capacity planning. System specification and purchase. Managing vendor relationships.
Applications of Open Source Operating Systems and Software to Solve Real-world Problems. Leveraging the contributions of thousands of talented developers and academics to provide a superior computing environment.
Unix System Management: Any Unix flavours, but with a particular emphasis on FreeBSD. Linux and Solaris skills are also strong. OS Installation, configuration, upgrading, tuning and hardening.
Voluntary contributions to Free Software projects include articles in "BSD Hacks", and perl coding for the FreshPorts.org website. I am a regular contributor to several FreeBSD mailing lists and have contributed software and bugfixes to the project, as well as maintaining a number of FreeBSD ports -- of which phpMyAdminis the most prominent.
Team Leadership: Management of Systems Administration Team. Acting as mentor to junior staff. Knowledge transfer and user education. Being a knowledge resource. Communication in plain English.
Applications and Services: Strong skills in DHCP, DNS, SMTP, OpenLDAP, RDBMS: MySQL, Postgresql, Apache, Jakarta Tomcat, SSH,TCP/IP, IPv6, Firewalls:PF, IPFW, Backup:Bacula
Languages: shell scripting, sed, awk, Perl, SQL. Some C and PHP. Development Support Skills:CVS, gdb, make, (both GNU and Berkeley styles) Documentation:HTML, LaTeX, some nroff document markup.

Employment History

Director Black Earth Consulting Dec 2009 - Present	I founded Black Earth Consulting to better exploit the potential of free and open-source software to deliver effective solutions. We can take your requirements, and put together the pieces of freely available software to make it happen.
Systems Architect The Bunker Oct 2007 - Dec 2009	Partly internal consultant and trouble shooter for problems of the more tenacious kind; partly sales support and advisor to the sales team's technical architects and partly the person who ensures that implementation projects work smoothly and deliver the required functionality to customers.
Systems Administration Manager The Bunker Feb 2005 - Oct 2007	Managing a Systems Administration team of eight, providing 24x7 support cover for The Bunker's operations. Design and Implementation of customer installations — primarily Open Source Managed Service systems. Provision, management and monitoring of a wide spectrum of systems.
Systems Administrator The Bunker Nov 2004 - Feb 2005	Working with OpenSource Unix/Linux applications. High Availability Firewalls (OpenBSD PF/CARP) to MySQL database servers with Terabyte scale disk arrays. High performance, secure web applications (Java/Tomcat, PHP) with replicated database backends. Backup solutions (Amanda, Bacula). Mail servers (Exim, Sendmail, Cyrus Imapd). VPN Tunnels.
Independent Contractor Parasol IT Feb 2004 - Apr 2004	Contributed three of the articles published in "BSD Hacks" by Dru Lavigne, (pub. O'Reilly Media Inc, May 2004) Various short term contracts
Cryptosphere Ltd Mar 2003 - Nov 2003	In March 2003, together with 3 other colleagues, I founded Cryptosphere Ltd. This startup company aimed to provide PKIX services and cryptographically secured, verifiable data transmission for our clients. The company was dissolved in 2005.
Tornado Entertainment Ltd Mar 2001 - Sep 2002 Unix Systems Administrator	Tornado Entertainment Ltd was founded in 1999. The aim of the company was to provide the infrastructure and technology to distribute and sell digital content (music, video, games) online within a secure environment on a global scale.
Inpharmatica Ltd 1998 - Mar 2001 Systems Administrator	Inpharmatica was a bioinformatics company spun out of University College, London, specialising in drug discovery via proteomic and genomic analysis.
P&L Systems 1995 - 1998 Technical Consultant: Systems Administration	P&L Systems was at the time the UK's leading NextStep and OpenStep VAR, offering a wide range of services and products related to that operating system: from off-the-shelf software packages through to custom object oriented software design and a complete support and maintenance service for OpenStep installations.

Education

Oxford University 1991 - 1996	D.Phil, Chemistry Thesis: "Computational Models of Structure and Dynamics", 1996. Supervisor Prof. C. M. Dobson, Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory. The final year of the Thesis was spent working part time at P&L Systems, hence the overlap of dates.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1989 - 1991	Ph.D. program. I began work towards a Ph.D at MIT, but had to abandon the course after nearly two years due to personal difficulties caused by living in the U.S.A.
Oxford University 1985 - 1989	B.A., Hons., Chemistry 1^st class. Awarded an Open Scholarship on entry. Final Degree Class Awarded 1^*. Overall 4^th place in Part I of the Final Public Examination. Extra Curricular Activities: President of O.U. Scientific Society Michaelmas Term 1987. Rowed for St John's College 3rd VIII. Member of O.U. Speculative Fiction Group.
Christ's Hospital School Horsham, W. Sussex 1978 - 1985	4 A-levels, 10 O-levels

Miscellaneous

UK Driving License: No endorsements.
Hobbies: Cookery: Indian and Chinese dishes a speciality. Collecting and reading Science Fiction. Riding my bicycle. Riding my bicycle a lot.

Referees

Names and addresses of referees will be supplied upon request.

An up to date version of this CV is always available from my personal web site: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/cv.xhtml