System architecture
Designing systems that survive contact with real customers, real data volumes and real deadlines.
About
KHD
Principal Engineer at AVEVA. Founder of BandVolt Ltd. Fourteen years of building software other people depend on, from Ballymoney in Northern Ireland.
- 2011First line shipped
- 14 yrsIn the industry
- 2Companies, one of them mine
The story
I'm Keith, a Principal Engineer based in Ballymoney, Northern Ireland, fourteen years into a career that started as a placement student and hasn't slowed down since.
I started at 8over8 in 2011 on a year out from my degree, came back full time after graduating, and stayed on through the acquisition by AVEVA. Growing up inside one product line taught me the thing that still shapes how I work: you end up maintaining everything you build, so build it accordingly.
These days I architect enterprise systems for global capital projects, set the practices other teams build against, and spend a fair bit of my time helping other engineers get unstuck. The work I'm proudest of is rarely the clever part. It's the part still running, untouched, years later.
Outside AVEVA I run BandVolt Ltd, a company that grew out of a passion project and that I built end to end on my own. It's the fastest I've ever learned anything, and it's where most of what I know about running a site properly came from.
What I do
Where my time goes
Full-stack delivery
From the schema to the pixel. .NET and C# at work, Go and React on my own projects.
Mentoring & technical leadership
Bringing engineers up, and making the calls that let a team move without tripping over itself.
Running a company
Product, brand, infrastructure and support for BandVolt, all of it in the evenings.