About

...me

I'm Laurence. I currently work as the Research and Development Lead for OCF Limited, leading development of OCF Steel Stack - their HPC management platform - keeping up with the latest (and future) technologies in HPC and implementing the batsh*t crazy ideas of my boss.

Most recently, before this, I worked as a systems architect for Sopra Steria specialising in automation, orchestration and HPC solutions in highly secure environments and before that for Johnson Matthey, looking after their on-premise and cloud HPC solutions and broader research computing environments.

The majority of my career, before Johnson Matthey, I spent running, building, designing and procuring HPC and broader research computing systems (such as storage solutions) in Higher Education - initially at Loughborough University and then The University of Birmingham. For my last few years at The University of Birmingham, I worked in the Research Software Group, providing BEAR Software services, as a Senior Research Software Engineer (although I did less programming then than when I was a System Administrator - I should do a blog post about that!). My staff page(last retrieved 2019-06-04) on our website had this summary of me:

Laurence has 10 years experience as a high performance computing (HPC) system administrator, at both Birmingham and Loughborough universities where he spent a substantial amount of time helping users with their HPC jobs and troubleshooting HPC software problems. He was heavily involved in the procurement of the latest iteration of BlueBEAR, as well as two clusters at Loughborough, and is a RedHat Certified Engineer. Prior to this he was a software developer writing stock management systems for car and tractor dealerships. He has a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Warwick.

In addition to my BSc "Bachelor of Science (with Honours) in Computer Science Class two, Division 1", I now also have a PGCert "Postgraduate Certificate (Higher Education) with Distinction", from when I was teaching C++ to masters students, and an MSc "Master of Science Digital And Technology Specialist (Enterprise Architect) with Commendation".

In September 2024 I was diagnosed with ADHD (there's a blog post about that) and, later, also autism (which I found very upsetting, I'm yet to bring myself to write a post about that and it is that which has derailed the promised "part 2" of my ADHD post). I also have anxiety, haemorrhoids and perianal haematoma, OCD (which was first diagnosed in 2014), symptomatic diverticular disease, incontinence, selective (situational) mutism, vasovagal (situational) syncope and inflammatory arthritis. I am trying to share my experiences of these, when my anxiety about opening up allows, on this blog in the hope that other people who, like me, find it difficult to express and share their authentic selves might see they are not alone.

...the Blog

This is my personal blog. All opinions, content, etc. is my own and does not represent those of my employer, clients or anyone else.

This Blog replaces my old Wordpress one and uses a single source to generate a public and private set of pages with notes, musings, technical content, moans and general randomness.

This iteration of my Blog uses Jekyll to generate the static HTML you are now reading.

For more information see the first post I did on this Blog, in which I talk about my thoughts, rational and intent with this change to Jekyll.