Hi, I’m Scott Bennett-McLeish and I’m a software developer / devops guy who gets a kick out of writing code and playing with cloud services both for a living and in my spare time.

For the last few years I’ve been enjoying learning and solving day-to-day problems with a new and relatively large microservices style platform. We’re largely deploying to AWS (with some locally deployed Docker thrown in the mix) and has dragged the whole project into a polyglot development stack with Gradle, Groovy, Lombok, Chef/Ruby/Python, Docker and JSON for actually building and deploying; and then Gradle, Angular, Java8/11 and Postgresql in the mix for the applications & services themselves. Usage of AWS services has centred around CloudFormation for EC2/ELBs/ASGs with plenty of other services called in as needed. Recently, I’ve been exploring AWS Lambda and how it can fit into the overall picture as a more pragmatic solution over more traditional EC2-based services.

Throughout my career Java (and Groovy for most of it) has always been there, but other languages, libraries and frameworks come and go as needed or as the tides of my current employment vary. Things such as XSL, parsing datasets and dashboarding have piqued my interest in the past.

In the past little while I’ve been working on a couple side projects with Grails and Java for:

• an app for long term archival of photos/media utilising various AWS services
• some backend services for periodically parsing a list of websites for updates (particularly where those sites don’t provide an RSS feed etc.)
• a project to scoot data between different types of data sources using various messaging technologies
• an URL shortener app/service using S3 as the backend

My Bitbucket and Github accounts are an avenue into various projects I’ve toyed with over the last while.

I have spent some time on Stackoverflow over the years and every so often I post to Twitter if I see something interesting.

I’m on a journey with AWS Certifications, as of mid 2024 I actively maintain the 5 main certs along with some dabbling in the specialties.

Email scott@thecuriousdev.com if you’ve got a question, or some other combination of letters :)