I'm Stephen Souness, a professional software developer based in Christchurch, New Zealand.
I'm originally from New Zealand, but lived in London from September 2008 until August 2021 where I gained a lot of hands on experience with back end technologies, including developing and deploying microservices into cloud environments including CloudFoundry, Mesos, EC2, ECS, and AWS Lambda.
Over the course of my career I have utilised a range of database technologies, from relational databases such as MS SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL to NoSQL databases including MarkLogic, HBase and DynamoDB.
I am a firm believer in using the right technology for the right reasons, not just going with what is the most familiar or what might stand out on my CV.
Since about 2015 most of my work projects have involved asynchronous processing of data, applying AWS SQS or Apache Kafka to capture the raw data and make it available for applying business logic.
My GitHub contributions history mainly reflects when my employers have or have not been using GitHub as their preferred source code host, so 2020 through to 2021 isn't the only time that I've been committing code.