My Journey

Thanks & welcome!

I thought now is a good time to write a bit about myself in general & how I came to be in Tech & start to build SaaS products.

I’m a father of 4 girls & a step-son; a fiancé & all-round tech geek. I’m a full-time Senior DevOps Engineer & when I’m not working I’m also a WordPress Web Designer, Python Developer & entrepreneur.

I only joined the world of Tech in 2019 though & here’s how I got here:

I left school at 16 with just average pass grades (mainly C’s) which was enough to get me into a fast-track college course on Accountancy.

Following a year in college and with a part-AAT qualification under my belt I took a job at an accountancy practice earning a measly £6k.

I quickly realised this was neither the career or environment for me and so ended up moving after just 5 months into the world of Accounts Payable. I had a few roles in that space over a 2 year period with my highest salary being £12.5k

I then had a minor crisis and gave up my comfortable office work for a warehouse and then a factory production line before spending 10 weeks in army basic training and landing back in my home town of Oxford without a job.

I was very fortunate to be given a temp-to-perm role at a local publisher where, unbeknownst to me, I started a career in payment processing. Banking cheques and allocation of payments was the order of the day for a good few years. I progressed gradually from £20k to £26k salary.

I then moved into a management position at a national charity where I really managed to make some progress in my career with several promotions in a 4.5 year period.

It was during this time I’d began to learn about programming, my first taste being automation in Excel with VBA!

Fast-forward to 2019 and I’m a Senior Operations Manager earning £47k per year at the age of 32 - I’m pretty pleased with myself but I’ve exhausted my potential promotions and so start to learn about web design, Linux & Python...

In February 2019 I leave my very comfortable career behind to freelance as a Technical Virtual Assistant. I was providing website design and hosting services to clients alongside some general admin an , social media management and SEO. It was great but pretty tough going!

I made lot of mistakes running that business, not least the lack of marketing and putting all my eggs in one client’s basket!

It’s where my twitter handle came from The Male VA - I do still offer the WordPress & hosting services to local businesses today so not a total failure!

During the 9 months or so I was freelancing I also upped my focus on server management techniques using just a RaspberryPi & some Udemy courses!

I should have been marketing my business but I think I knew the writing was on the wall so needed to make myself employable in tech.

In November 2019 I got my lucky break and landed a Junior DevOps role. My first ever role in tech with nothing but my previous 9 months in terms of experience really.

I was honestly over the moon, even with a £30k salary - which wasn’t really enough to cover my outgoings!

Whilst I was grateful for that position, the money & environment just wasn’t enough for me. So, when I was approached in Feb 2020 on LinkedIn for a role I jumped at the chance & got back to a good salary (£52k + bonus) and had a group of experienced DevOps engineers to work with.

Here we are then, I’m 35 and earning good money again.. happy and staying put right? No, not I.

The problem with having DevOps Engineer in your title on LinkedIn is that you get approached almost daily with new roles paying even greater amounts of money!

So, as it turns out, it was exactly 1 year to the day that I parted ways with that company and moved to my current one. The offer was great and more than I’d ever earned before. It’s fully remote and is also a Senior DevOps position so now I’m happy, for now.

And now onto my SaaS journey which has just begun. I’m in the process of developing a new web app that will allow you to manage your life admin tasks from a simple dashboard. It’ll have reminders and mechanisms in place that should save you money each year.

If you got this far then thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to get to know me.