I currently work as Head of IT for a small London based hedge fund. This involves a wide range of different skills, technologies and tasks. In the past I have also worked as a web developer, infrastructure manager specialising in disaster recovery solutions and databases. Many years ago, I worked as a print designer. I moved in web design mainly to learn how to use colour, and because colour litho was way out of my budget back then.
Information Management
While many IT people are technologists, I have always seen the technology side of the job as a mean to the end of communicating information. I took a degree in History from Cambridge, which mainly involved taking in a lot of information and digesting it into something which made sense. I view my role in IT as being very similar, and increasingly so with newer trends such as Big Data, and the increasing importance of statistics, dashboards and business intelligence.
Web development
Hedge funds are a private lot, our customers are few in number, and fit in a limited demographic, and our needs are mostly internal. This has led to me becoming increasingly an intranet focused developer.
However, to keep my hand in with the mass-communication and marketing elements of web design, I take on small commissions, and have recently produced a number of sites for friends and family. I have also acted as a part-time consultant on a number of other sites, including a carbon brokerage, and a recruitment site.
