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Bruce Becker, Ph.D.

Residence : Catania, Italy

Email : brucellino@hey.com

Professional : github.com/brucellino : linkedin.com/in/brucellino

Personal website : brucellino.github.io

Date of Birth : 9 October 1977

Highest Degree : Ph.D. (2007, University of Cape Town)

Nationality : South African

Languages : English, Italian, French, Afrikaans

Profile

A physicist who has made a first career out of building digital infrastructures for research and a second out of building application delivery platforms for business. Applies the scientific principles of observation, hypothesis formation and critical thinking to professional work. As a technologist, has embraced the DevOps movement and the "everything as code" pattern. Emphasis on quality. Sees the big picture. As an African, has worked in varied, challenging and complex environments, and is equally comfortable in the South or North.

Skills

Strong analytical and technical background, paired with strong written and oral communication skills. Good experience managing and collaborating with communities of practice. Experience in medium-size teams and large collaborations. Management, communication, planning and organisational skills needed to undertake research and development projects at national and regional scale. Software engineering, data analytics, infrastructure engineering, open science, and platform development. Has built scientific application delivery platforms, HPCs, grids, clouds, digital repositories, science gateways, discussion fora, chat bots, continuous integration and delivery platforms.

Languages and Tools : Go, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, HCL, YAML, JSON, git, Groovy, shell

Cloud platforms : AWS, Kubernetes : GitHub, GitLab

Automation, IaC and CI/CD : Ansible, Jenkins, Puppet, Hubot, Inspec : Hashicorp stack (Packer, Vault, Consul, Nomad, Terraform)

Observability : Prometheus, Elastic, Grafana

Career Highlights

  • Co-created continuous delivery platform for UEFA, contributing to most successful and cost-effective Euro competition (Euro2020), during unprecedented global pandemic.
  • Certified expert in FitSM service management standard.
  • 5 EU-funded research and development projects over 10 years.
  • Authored and delivered several short courses in methods and tools of research infastructure, across the continent of Africa.
  • Co-ordinated the formation of the Africa-Arabia Regional Operations Centre (AAROC, 2013), pan-African body for operating research compute infrastructure.
  • Started South African National Grid (SAGrid, 2008) – a federation of compute resources providers from research groups, universities and national research laboratories in South Africa.
  • Ph.D in physics (2007, University of Cape Town) on ALICE experiment at CERN LHC.

Approach to Software and Technology

Given the varied responsibilities of his career, Bruce has had to quickly learn and adopt new languages, technologies, methodologies and toolkits to address a wide range of scientific and technical problems. When new techniques, principles or methods are required, he takes the initiative to learn, evaluate and implement where appropriate. He believes in sustainable development of quality software, through the use of version control, testing strategies, continuous integration, delivery and deployment. He applies the principles of reliability engineering to the services under his responsibility.

Current Position

2021 - Present : DevOps Lead at Italian offensive security firm

Current Responsibilities

  • Strategic support to product delivery team
  • Service owner for product delivery platform
  • Design and implementation of on-prem product platform and delivery automation
  • Create internal quality and safety guidelines for developers
  • On-prem infrastructure automation

Employment History

2019 - 2021: UEFA

  • Service owner for continuous integration service
  • Operational support to UEFA competition match night
  • Development and maintenance of delivery pipelines as code
  • Provide support to application development teams on the methods and tooling of the continuous delivery platform
  • Ensure alignment wit UEFA standard policies and procedures, including Incident, Problem and Change Management.

2018 - 2019: EGI.EU

  • Senior Operations Officer, EGI.eu. Responsible for Capacity Management in Europe's largest distributed research computing infrastructure.
  • Adpated existing procedures to implement continuous integration of infrastructure components
  • Delivered continuous testing and delivery pipelines, implemented configuration management, authored several internal tools and style guides for improving collaboration and delivery.

2009 – 2018: CSIR

Highlights and main responsibilities:

2017 - 2018 : Design and implementation of Data Intensive Research Infrastructure for South Africa

2015 : Development of initial design and service offering of Data Intensive Research Infrastructure for South Africa (DIRISA)

2014 : Research support to Human Heredity and Health in Africa Project (H3Africa) - consultancy, service development and high-performance data transfer support.

2013 : Co-authored National Initiative for Cyberinfrastructure Report (NICI) in South Africa, a document prepared for national government addressing the harmonisation of national e-Infrastructure : Technical support, training and consultancy for Square Kilometer Array project and other astronomy user groups.

2010 - 2012 : Development of advanced services for the Network, including data transfer gateways and videoconferencing systems.

2008 - 2012 : EPIKH - EU-FP7 funded Exchange Programme to advance e-Infrastructure Know-How. : Co-Author of the project, country coordinator for South Africa.

2007 - 2012 : HP-UNESCO Brain Gain Initiative : Responsible for the training activities of more than 20 researchers from around the African continent and Middle East.

2006: Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN)

June 2006 – August 2006 : Postdoctoral Fellow at INFN Sezione di Cagliari.

2005 - 2006 Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA)

Feb. 2005 - Feb. 2006 : Postdoctoral study at the Département d'Astrophysique, Physique Nucleaire et d'Instrumentation Associée (DAPNIA) of the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA), Saclay, France.

Education

2007 Ph.D (Physics) : University of Cape Town

Title : Design, implementation and physics performance of the ALICE dimuon spectrometer High-Level Trigger (dHLT).

2002 M.Sc (Physics) : University of Cape Town.

Title : Reaction mechanisms of low-energy heavy-ion nuclear physics.

1999 B.Sc(Hons) : University of Cape Town.

Major : Large-scale structure of the universe.

1998 B.Sc (Physics, Astronomy) : University of Cape Town.