About Me

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View my profile on LinkedInstack overflow profile

The Professional:

Download a copy of my CV here: Charles Wilkinson CV January 2020

Ground up development and consultancy background with broad consultancy experience leading many omnichannel implementations with exposure to an array of verticals including retail, telco, travel, groceries and FMCG.

Specialist in enterprise and solution architecture with wide experience of business domains and large scale. Track record of technology transformation with deep exposure to modern practices including microservices and indeed Serverless.

Significant practical experience in all parts of IT delivery from requirements elicitation through to operational support, bringing this experience to bear to earn trust and change minds at all levels, but especially at board level.

A strong proponent of effective Agile and product team culture, enjoying the challenge of reconciling these ideas with traditional corporate values and objectives.

Passionate about reimagining enterprise architecture and injecting startup culture to create a lean, minimum responsible governance framework for supporting innovation.

Mission statement: Use great architecture to drive business agility – Sounds like BS, but if you can do it, you no longer need the traditional safety net of Gartner/Forrester report waving and the 5 year roadmap. Agility IS the goal.

An excitable speaker at events, enjoying sharing knowledge and pushing our industry forward with robust dialogue. Not afraid to be wrong.

Press

London AWS Summit 2018

Speaking about serverless architecture at River Island Clothing

AWS Re:invent 2018:

Speaking about next-generation microservice, serverless and event driven architectures with a focus on digital commerce.

Article: The Enterprise Architect is Dead

Discussing the shifting role of enterprise and solution architects and my approach to building the architecture team at River Island:
https://www.ritechstyle.com/news-insight/view/26/the-enterprise-architect-is-dead.aspx

Tech Q&A:

Discussing my career and industry observations:
https://www.thirdrepublic.com/blog/architecture-charles-wilkinson

Skills Summary

  • Practical technology thought leadership & strategy
  • Cloud architectures. Including Serverless & microservices
  • Engineering practice development
  • Event driven architecture
  • Agile & product teams
  • Solution architecture
  • Digital transformation
  • Agile practice & delivery
  • Enterprise systems design & development
  • DevOps practice development

Though not a practitioner in all, a wide range of technical knowledge including:

  • Java incl. Spring & Spring boot
  • Node
  • Containers & container orchestration
  • HTML, CSS, JS
  • Bash
  • Unix systems administration
  • SQL
  • Various CI/CD tools
  • Various testing frameworks & tools
  • Terraform
  • Various AWS services

The Hobbyist

In my free time I enjoy building things. As a youngster this meant radio controlled model boats and cars, a lot of hot glue and a mother exasperated over the state of my bedroom. These days, I dabble with amateur electronics – Arduino and Raspberry Pi – though it’s my wife dealing with the related mess, rather than my mother.

During my sadly limited free time, I tinker with almost anything I can disassemble and it’s high time I started documenting my exploits. To this end, I am going to force myself to take photographs of all the little projects and hacks that I do and post them up on my shiny new blog. Feel free to take a look at my Projects.