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Placing a 'Spotlight On' some of our much valued partners, this month it's the turn of Gareth Hailes from Agility By Nature.
What attracted you to working as a partner alongside Venture 1?
When Agility By Nature started, we knew we needed a strong network of partners. Having approached several potential partners - Venture 1 was the only one that gave us the confidence for the scale of the implementation we needed to undertake for a client who needed DevOps augmentation for a large-scale release management project.
What sorts of things do you do with Venture 1?
Venture 1 and Agility By Nature have worked together to build a CI/CD solution in a regulated environment for an Insurance client - we needed to ensure that the client was able to press a single button to release to controlled environments ensuring that automated testing failed safely should an issue arise whilst also generating release notes for regulatory purposes. The end product was an Infrastructure as Code (IAC) wrapped "thing of beauty" that ensured safety & compliance was baked into the release process.
What’s your favourite thing about working with Venture 1?
I would have to say it's the values we share - we are both committed to doing the right thing and the thing being done right. Sometimes when working under pressure it's easy to take the path of least resistance but in the end its the client that suffers long term and that's never a position any consultancy should take. Agility By Nature and Venture1 are experts in our fields with decades of experience in delivering complex solutions in demanding environments so good communication comes naturally with great outcomes.
Favourites:
Favourite Film: Ah that's a tricky one....I've always been a fan of The Fifth Element but there's greats like Brandon Lee in The Crow, Apocalypse Now, Stephen Kings IT or anything with Robin Williams.
Favourite Dinner: A good BBQ with homemade potato salad!
Favourite Drink: Has to be an Old Fashioned 🙂
Favourite Book: That would depend on professional reading or holiday reading. Professionally that would be The Phoenix Project - back in 2013 it was the first book that built a narrative around the importance of DevOps as a cultural practice not just a tooling sales pitch.
Favourite Brand: Never really held much affinity for any specific brand to be honest - my purchasing habits are really based on "I am not paying that because it's got a logo on it!".
Favourite Emoji: You don't really want an answer to this surely 🙂
If you could invite anyone round for dinner, who would it be?
Aaron Swartz He was an amazing person with such a passion for technology and freedom of information. He was a prodigy who at 14 co-authored the RSS technology, was one of the architects for Creative Commons, co-founded Reddit & campaigned relentlessly for social justice and political transparency.
Paul Ekman He's a renowned American Psychologist who researched facial expressions and non-verbal communication - in 1967 he proved that facial expressions are universal by working with an isolated group in Papua New Guinea and discovered micro-expressions.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez She's an American politician who really believes in change - campaigning vocally for the climate, equality, healthcare and the economy. Once quoted for saying “Change takes courage".