Meet the Team: Bill Lutton
We thought it would be interesting to run some blogs about the super people at Cloudhouse. We’re speaking to people across all our teams to find out a bit more about them, what their role is and what makes them tick. We also ask them to spill the beans on their worst IT fail… because it happens to the best of us!
Meet… Bill Lutton, Engineering
When did you join Cloudhouse?
December 2020. Although I’m relatively new to Cloudhouse and I haven’t had many opportunities to be with the team in person, I did manage to travel over to London for the Christmas 2021 get-together. I spent a few days doing the tourist things too – a little tour bus around the landmarks, a trip on the London Eye, buying a cap with the Tube logo!
Tell us a little about your career up to this point:
The grey beard represents 40 years of work in the field. Back then we wrote on clay tablets… I had a long career with Hewlett Packard, about 19 years, and worked primarily in firmware. I worked on instruments like spectrum analysers, building the software that went into them. Then I got working with a series of start-ups as a contractor. I ran a small business with my business partner and one of our clients was an early Webex company, developing computer-based conferencing. Following that we developed our own start-up on an antivirus program. The program looked for anything that tried to execute and, if it wasn’t preapproved, would block it. Out of that we developed a driver that notified us of any file accesses or execution requests made on a system. That went on to become what is now the real-time file change notification feature of Cloudhouse Guardian. So that’s the thread from 15 years ago that links my past working life with Cloudhouse!
What do you do at Cloudhouse?
I work on the Cloudhouse Guardian service. My job is primarily to work on the code for the data acquirers, what I like to call the data acquisition minions, that collect data from the target nodes and send it back to the server.
What’s the best thing about working at Cloudhouse?
One of the things I really like is that they have great commitment to a ‘high touch’ kind of approach to their customers. A key part of the business is building a peer relationship with customers and engaging them on the leading end of ideas and product direction, and maintaining that, taking it back into the product cycle. Cloudhouse looks to build relationships over a longer time scale, more than just the next quarter. I really appreciate working in that kind of environment.
Most embarrassing IT moment (e.g., hitting reply all when you really shouldn’t have, deleting something VERY important, leaving your laptop on the train…)
I fancy myself an electronics geek as well as a software geek. My personal laptop screen failed, so I thought “I’m an electrical engineer, I can fix this. I’ve seen a Dell technician do it in 15 minutes.” Over the course of six months, I ended up with a laptop that was completely non-functional and in a dozen pieces. I could not get the screen replaced. To this day is stands as testament to overconfidence…
Favourite sandwich filling?
I don’t know if it counts as a sandwich, but I’d choose a Monte Cristo. It’s a little like a club sandwich, with layers of ham and turkey and something else – and the kicker is it’s dipped in batter and then deep fried. You eat it with a knife and fork with raspberry jelly and mayonnaise.
How do you take your tea?
I start my day with English breakfast tea, one spoon of sugar and no milk. I prefer it stronger, so I always put two tea bags in and leave them for four or five minutes or so.
Cats or dogs?
Me: dog, wife: cat. We have had both for 30-odd years we’ve been married.
Dream holiday destination:
On my bucket list is someplace in the islands of Greece, a little mountainous village with white-washed buildings and a sparkling beach down below. That’s where I want to go next.
