Tom Skelley - Curriculum Vitae
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In October 2001, I joined Yahoo as the European Site Operations Team Leader. This role consisted of running the hardware, software, and operating systems running within Yahoo's European co-location facilities. The main European data center housed over 1000 servers. In addition to the main responsibilities, I also provided consultancy regarding the scalability and fault tolerance of some of Yahoo's major applications.
In 2002, I was promoted to European Systems Administration and Storage Manager, and given the additional mandate of providing backups for the whole of Europe.
One major project which I undertook during my tenure at Yahoo! was the relocation of Yahoo's main European data center from East London to North London. This project (involving over 1000 servers) took just 3 months from inception to completion, and was accomplished with zero downtime for most of the applications based in Europe.
A second project of note comprised the relocation of the hardware hosting the European public Yahoo! mail farms from numerous data centers in North America, to the new European data center in London.
During my tenure at Yahoo, I was responsible for a team of system administrators, hardware engineers, and backup staff of 5 people.
In January 2001, I left Netscape to join a small start up company, Airflash Wireless. Airflash provided location based services to mobile operators in various different countries, such as Orange (in the UK), Knight Ridder (in the US), and E-plus and Viag Interkom in Germany.
My role at Airflash comprised running the European data center, and support Airflash's corporate clients. Unfortunately Airflash was bought out by a competitor in September 2001 and the European staff were subsequently laid off.
At Netscape, I was initially employed to provide software for Netscape Application Server. Due to the size of the support team, and the product set provided by Netscape, I supporting many other products, including Netscape's Web, Directory (LDAP), Mail, Proxy servers.
Soon after joining Netscape, my responsibilities expanded to encompass all European technical escalations regarding the Netscape Enterprise (web) server, and managing the geographically local staff on a day to day basis.
My responsibilities also included on site consultancy and support visits to such companies as FT.com, Barclays Bank, Abbey National Building Society, and Egg.com - where I was present as the site launched.
At IBM, my responsibilities involved developing hardened Internet platforms for large corporate customers based around existing technologies, for example, RS6000 servers running AIX and IBM Connection Secure Server, or Netscape Enterprise Server. The installation of these products needed to be automated for reasons of uniformity and speed, and were therefore usually scripted using PERL and shell scripts.
I was also involved in the development of custom solutions for non-standard special bids. Examples included the replacement of the AIX standard telnet server daemon with a more secure version which utilised cryptographic cards from Security Dynamics, and customer deployment using other non-standard hardware and software.
Faculty of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
UK.
After working for Yahoo for two and a half years, I decided that I would like to take a career break. I chose to travel, experiencing a wide variety of cultures and places. Since March 2004 I have visited much of the world, including Africa, Asia (including China), Australia, New Zealand, South and North America.