Wade Smith

Background

About Wade Smith

I'm Wade and I like to solve problems. I've been that way since I was 10; I vividly remember a plumber asking my mother for a way to turn a handle-less valve, and me running off and proudly returning with a shifting spanner. I've also always loved building things, from cardboard suits of armour, to wooden tables, to custom circuit boards. In hindsight, it makes complete sense that I went on to complete multiple degrees in engineering, because at its core that's what the discipline is: solving problems by building things (okay, it's slightly more complicated than that). Initially I planned on going into hardware; my undergraduate was all about the physics and mathematics of electronics. But after a Master's focused on digital signal processing, and landing a first job as a software engineer, I decided to completely pivot the focus of my problem solving career from hardware to software. I was hired to help design and implement a system to manage on-site Kubernetes clusters and the software services that ran on them, a project that threw me into the development deep end and had me learn a lot of new skills to solve a lot of new problems (at least to me). The project sparked in me a passion for putting together software systems; for taking a big problem, breaking it down into smaller ones, and tackling those problems with just the right components or languages for the job. And that spark has only grown brighter since. I've written back end web services in Java and C#, created front end UIs using HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and linked applications together with powerful components like Apache Kafka and the Elastic Stack. I have practical experience with Docker containerised microservices and deploying them using Kubernetes. I've even implemented a configuration management system based on the Semantic Web (now that was heady stuff, which is why I'm extra proud of it). In my free time I'm still building things (scratching that hardware itch), and amongst other things I'm an avid rock climber; I particularly enjoy bouldering, where the goal is to solve "boulder problems"(wink wink).