User:David McBride

In 1999 I moved to London and started a 4-year Masters degree in Computing (Software Engineering) from Imperial College. During this time I worked as a sysadmin in the Computing Department's specialist Computing Support Group, developing a reputation for knowing what I'm talking about as well as being a very useful and helpful person to know.

During an already-busy 2002 I simultaneously became both a full-time student as well as a full-time employee of IBM UK Ltd. when I spent 6 months as an Industrial Trainee working in the Java Technology Centre at IBM Hursley.

I graduated tired but happy in 2003 with my 2‧1 MEng in Software Engineering — and was pleasantly surprised to be offered the opportunity to join the London e-Science Centre as a Research Associate, which I accepted. As well as continuing to be a Generally Useful Person, I worked on a range of grid computing systems — including development work on the Large Hadron Collider Compute Grid, which culminated with the integration of the Department's 400-processor production Mars cluster into the production grid.

Also in 2003, I — along with a few other DoC graduates — founded Tastycake.net, a small-scale hosting service intended to provide us, and a few of our friends, a continuous internet presence for ourselves now that we no-longer had access to Imperial's hosting resources.

In Oct 2006, looking for a change, I reverted, pumpkin-like, back into a student and embarked on a full-time PhD — still at Imperial — working to put some of my ideas on how to build a better large-scale authentication system into practice.