Ben Elgar

I founded Krucible, a company developing a platform for providing temporary Kubernetes clusters for testing and development purposes. The motivation behind Krucible is that testing Kubernetes is difficult and expensive, in large part due to the complexity of setting up the necessary surrounding infrastructure to perform those tests. Krucible handles that for you, leaving you free to write code and not manage infrastructure and operations.

At MongoDB I worked on a Kubernetes operator written in Go for Ops Manager which allowed customers to create, delete, monitor, backup and otherwise manage MongoDB instances as part of their Kubernetes cluster.

The operator is available on MongoDB's website and on Github.

At mLab I mainly worked on an open source system orchestration platform built on Kubernetes that we called Lattice. Lattice allowed users to write fully declarative system definitions to orchestrate large systems at scale. Lattice handled communicating with cloud providers to create cloud resources and then create, destroy, scale, monitor, secure and otherwise administer Kubernetes clusters in order to achieve the desired specified system configuration.

Lattice is available on Github (though hasn't been maintained since mLab's acquisition by MongoDB).

I worked for CPD for Teachers as a teacher trainer, a content creator and lead web developer. In my capacity as a content creator, I wrote a large number of tutorials, blog posts and worksheets explaining a wide variety of complex tasks. These were used in courses and lesson plans in primary and secondary schools across the country.

As a trainer, I travelled around the country teaching primary and secondary school teachers to use complex technologies in their classrooms. The technologies included everything from Python to MIT's App Inventor to the Raspberry Pi.

As lead web developer, I led a team to redevelop the company's website from the ground up, including a comprehensive booking system, a mass emailer, a backup system and a content management system. This role also involved managing their large database—which included dozens of trainers, thousands of users, tens of thousands of bookings and every school in England and a significant percentage of the schools in the United States.

I studied Computer Science at the University of Bristol for four years after which I graduated with a first-class honours master's degree. I won a number of departmental and faculty awards in every year, including for the best third-year project and contributions to the life of the faculty. I also ran the Computer Science society with hundreds of members where I organised sponsorship from companies such as Microsoft and Bank of America and hosted events and hackathons.