Dave Hall (@skwashd)

About Dave Hall

This is my personal blog. I don’t post here very often. When I do, it is often random thoughts.

I am the owner of Dave Hall Consulting, an independent tech consultancy and contracting business. My clients span early stage startups, right through to massive global enterprises. The primary focus of my work is using automation to drive efficiencies.

My extensive experience in software engineering, devops, training, business processes, and change management allow me effectively communicate with all stakeholders. One minute I could be discussing the business strategy with an executive. While the next I’m explaining to an engineer how their implementation can be improved to better meet customer needs. I can review a manual process and identify opportunities for automation, then help the team transition to the new workflow.

Recently I worked with a Fortune 50 client to build an automation platform for their IT operations team. Over the last 5 years, the platform has delivered net annual cost savings of 1.5-2 million USD. I built the team from scratch, drove the architecture and strategic direction of the platform. This was the company’s first large scale implementation of event driven serverless.

When an early stage startup needed AWS environments to host their new app, they asked me to make it happen. I built out a new set of accounts in an AWS Organisation. Their containerised app was deployed to ECS using a GitHub Actions based CI/CD pipeline. Their environments are managed using terraform. From push to running on dev with all tests passing was under 5 minutes. This allows the team to test and iterate quickly.

A major Australian financial services institution was publishing website changes once a month after business hours. They wanted to be able to publish content and code changes on demand. I built a deployment pipeline that allowed when to go from idea to launched in an afternoon. The workflow captured all the sign offs required by compliance.

Let’s talk about how I can improve your business!