Andrew Taylor

So, it’s been a year at Rentokil. Actually it was last Friday, but I’ve been so busy that I’ve only just got round to writing. I have to say it’s been an amazing year with so many opportunities. So maybe I should explain how I got the job and what it’s involved since 9th December 2004.

I posted my CV on JobSite a few months after I graduated last year. I spent some time working for myself (t/a Hey Presto! Internet Services) and for 4D Internet but quickly decided working from my bedroom all day, every day, wasn’t good. I tried a few agencies locally for IT jobs but nothing much seemed to be available, or those that I did find I could’ve done 5 years ago without A-Levels or a degree, which wouldn’t have been very taxing.

Eventually an agency in town approached me with a research job based locally. Their description of it though sounded very dull and I decided not to pursue this. Although I did find out what the company was and discovered they had a very large IT department. So I sent my CV off to them on the off-change they had something else available.

Then about a week later another agency called to say they had a job for a local company they were trying to fill and my CV fitted the job locally. When the chap described the job, it began to sound familiar and when he told me the company name, turns out it was the same one the previous agency had already spoken to me about. This time though, the description I got was much more interesting, involving research of new technologies and development of all kinds of things, hardware and software. So, I had a telephone interview a few days later which mainly involved some questions about various technologies and nothing much I hadn’t dealt with before.

Apparently I did quite well in the phone interview (found out later I actually got every question right which no-one had done before :p) so was invited to a proper interview the next Monday. Anyway, to cut a long story short, they offered me the job there and then, to start the next week. Over the last 12 months I’ve been involved in a huge variety of projects, just some of them listed below:

• Common Authentication – a method of allowing customers to login to Rentokil Initial web sites and services with just one set of credentials
• SMS Gateway – development of a set of applications and scripts to send SMS messages via a GSM modem from a variety of sources.
• VMWare – server virtualisation – pretty much all new servers are virtual now and gradually moving all physical machines over too
• Reverse Proxy – proxy server for incoming web site requests and redirection to appropriate servers.
• SSL VPN – a technology to allow users to access resources on Rentokil’s internal network securely.
• RINX / RINA – Rentokil Initial’s own flavour of Linux. Most other projects are based on this in one way or another.

… and loads more. I’ll probably re-visit this post in the next week or so when I’ve got more thoughts

[EDIT]

As promised – some more updates. Other things I’ve been involved with:

• Exchange and Blackberries – deployment of internal Exchange system and susequent research into out-sourced solutions
• Citrix – deployment of applications using a Citrix Farm and an SSL VPN
• Various technologies for WebDev – including PHP development, LDAP, SOAP and other odds and sods

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