Ben King's README
Ben’s README
This README is designed to give you a bit of background information on me.
Related links
About me
Hi! I started with GitLab in December, 2021 as a Support Engineer for the APAC region. I live near Sydney, Australia 🇦🇺 and my primary operating hours are 8 AM to 4 PM (Australian Eastern).
Coffee Chat topics
If you’re reading this, you might be trying to find things we can talk about for a coffee chat or 1:1.
Here’s a bunch of topics I’ll be happy to talk about:
Games
- 🎲 Board Games. My favourites at the moment are Catan, Ticket to Ride and Pandemic.
- 🎮 Video Games. I’m a fan of RPG and/or Strategy games, like Surviving Mars, the Fallout series, and usually anything made by Obsidian Entertainment.
- 🏰 Tabletop Games. I have an ever-expanding collection of TTRPG books, including GURPS, Traveller (Mongoose 2nd Edition), D&D 5th Edition, Cyberpunk 2020 & Red, Shadowrun and the Fallout TTRPG.
Books
Favourites include:
- Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, and the entire Robot series.
- Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
- Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons.
Places
These are some places I’ve visited that I am always keen to talk about:
My working style
I like to work from the early A.M. (my time) which overlaps with part of the AMER region. If you are in AMER, we should chat in your afternoon!
I have a tendency to “dive-in” head first into a ticket, even if I am not sure how it will be resolved. I like to learn as I go as hands-on is the best way for me to develop skills. If you want to pair, we should aim for tickets that we might both be unfamiliar with.
How to communicate
I keep Slack and Email open all-day, so I encourage you to reach out to me with whatever suits you for async communication. If we have too much back-and-forth via messaging we should switch to a Zoom call to speed things up.
Weaknesses
I come from a bare-metal, server hosting industry. This means a lot of my experience comes from investigating physical hardware and networking faults. With this, my application-layer knowledge is still developing, especially when it comes to high-availability, kubernetes, databases, and external cloud providers.
Strengths
I have experience with a variety of networking concepts, particularly lower levels of the OSI model. When in doubt, remember: It was DNS. I enjoy the idea of “Self-Hosting” so I use docker to run a variety of services at home, running things like NextCloud, Pi-Hole and of course GitLab!
WFH Setup
| Item | Brand |
|---|---|
| Web Camera | Logitech C920 HD PRO WEBCAM |
| Microphone | Audio-Technica AT2005USB |
| Chair | AK Racing K7 |
| Monitor | Kogan 34" 144Hz Ultrawide |
| Headphones | Sony Noise Cancelling WH1000XM4 |
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