#1 Hoi aka Hoiboy

Before all the AI stuff, I spent eight years at Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. My title said Data Centre Engineer the whole time. Flat organisation, and I never needed a new title to prove what I could do.

Superpowers: ADHD and OCD for getting shit done properly.

Current role: AI Product & Automation Engineer.

What I quietly did: the role outgrew the title almost straight away. Data Centre Engineer on paper, but in practice the infrastructure architect, the procurement lead, the project manager (PMP certified) and the data centre manager, all at once, running the sites largely on my own for years. I designed and rolled out Canonical’s cloud data centres across London, Boston and Taipei, mentored the engineers who came after me, coordinated remotely with everyone from contractors to the COO across disciplines and teams scattered all over the world, and negotiated the supplier deals down hard enough to save the business a small fortune. Whatever I was handed, I gave back in better shape than I found it. Nobody threw a party for any of it. The work just spoke for itself, even when the title didn’t. That is usually how it goes for the quiet ones.

I had great managers, directors, and peers who supported my growth there. Hence why I was there for so long. Much appreciation to those who cared! I will always remember and love ya! I also made a lot of close friends there who I still stay in touch with regularly to this day.

A Canonical war story: For a while I led the technical planning and setup for our internal events, and sometimes external ones too. One year we had a two week sprint in Malta, and the entire equipment shipment got sent to the US by mistake. When the courier tried to correct it, it somehow ended up in Kabul, Afghanistan, right near active conflict. We only found out on the setup weekend. Someone had clearly dropped the ball, and we had two days before 500+ engineers from all over the world started landing.

Armed with two credit cards, one company and one personal, me and Gareth had to come up with a plan, put together an MVP (aka bootstrap the whole setup), and roll it out. It was not a trivial setup: secure wired and wifi, both tunnelled and gatewayed back to our data centre infrastructure so every engineer had access for the full two weeks. We roped in the hotel tech team to borrow whatever was not worth buying, worked with business services to keep approvals fast and track our real kit in case it turned up, and hunted down the only IT shop on the island, a Maplin. We called ahead with a shopping list, had them hold the stock, taxied 30 minutes across Malta to pay for it, and hauled it back. Our hotel room became a mad scientist’s mancave, cables and equipment everywhere, a whole mini secure infrastructure wired up by hand. Two days non-stop, and it was done.

The event ran its full two weeks and it worked, right through an actual hurricane. And the raining fish was not a figure of speech either: real fish, scattered all over the streets. Our original kit finally turned up in the last few days, cases dented and wheels broken but all there, and we never needed a single piece of it. I stayed on a few extra days and roamed Gozo, Malta’s sister island, for some downtime and a bit of retrospective thinking. That trip was where the idea actually started: miniaturise and modularise the whole event kit. It took another year or two doing it step by step, auditing, remapping, reordering, building, disposing of the old, modularising, testing, and rolling out the new approach, with spares kept back at base in case we ever had to ship an emergency drop for another edge case like this one. I led it, but it was a team effort through and through. Good times and proper adventure. The kind that make the best stories :)

The identity bit: I grew up in Birmingham, in mixed-culture schools, and my best mate growing up was a ginger. I started tinkering with tech when I was 7, and it never left me. For a long time growing up I had no real idea who I was. I was clueless and aimless, with no goals or ambition, and I tried loads of things that never felt quite right. A few things always stuck around, and a few more I only discovered much later in life. Those are the things that make up who I am and what I do now. When I was younger I rejected my own East/South-East Asian culture, and it was only when I got older that I really came to embrace it. Stereotypically known as a Banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside lol). I started out a bottled-up introvert, but I outgrew it. After years of self-development, and a few catalysts like wine and Guinness (a lot of it!), I’m more of an open book now. When I am not socialising or dancing, I still like spending most of my time alone in my mancave though, working on things I find interesting like trading, tech, AI, and community building. It’s been a constant struggle to work out who I am, and to keep developing who I want to become.

The flex, nothing to do with tech: I started dancing at 28, the only bloke in a room full of women. I went and found teachers, practised and practised, explored, and kept a curious mind wide open. The hard knocks humbled me, and that is exactly how I got pretty good. Years later it turns out I built the largest Brazilian Zouk online communities around. I’ve also travelled to many parts of the world to take part in over 100+ Brazilian Zouk international events, which is quite an achievement for me. The learning never really stops, This is the Way.

Tech tip: don’t let the AI lead, you lead it. A good harness (rules, guardrails, review gates) beats a clever prompt every time. If you are still prompting constantly, you are doing it inefficiently. Learn to build a harness, or easier: mine is public, so point your AI at it and ask it to build one into your own setup using mine as a framework.

Life tip: you don’t have to become the loud one to get noticed. Do the work, then let someone you trust point at it. That’s what this group is for.

To anyone reading who never puts their hand up: your work is worth more than your comfort with self-promotion. Come say hello, and we’ll do the shouting for you.

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