Hi, I’m Phil McGaw, the Head of Engineering at Royal London.
I've been writing code and designing software solutions for a pretty long time across a range of customers and industries, but still feel like I always have so much more to learn.

I do enjoy the learning process though, and really got the bug for learning again years ago when I started to develop solutions on the public cloud. The idea (and reality) that you can develop an absolute world-class software solution, cherry-picking from battle-tested cloud services in your bedroom that could compete with a comparable large organisation that spends millions of pounds a year on rent for their self-managed data-centres alone. I love the level playing field that cloud brings.
Although, I love being a software architect with the hundreds of cloud services to pick from more!

Some of my more recent interests have however been with going full-on, data-obsessed Amazonian when trying to create a DevOps culture within Royal London.
Apart from all the infrastructure-as-code and code pipelines that we've been implementing tp provision environments with applications in record time, I've been really getting under the covers of how we can use machine learning to better understand application telemetry to support dev teams in reducing tech debt, and suppoorts our Ops teams in reducing our MTTx. I don't think it will be long either until we'll be able to predict a potential service outage after a deployment within a few minutes.

Lastly, I'm one of the pioneers of the open-source software community at Royal London, and together with some like-minded individuals in Royal London, we are constantly on the lookout for how we as a responsible modern mutal, can contribute back to open-source software with either new projects or contributing to established projects. Watch this space.