The People Behind the Tech: Ant Kennedy

Please meet Ant Kennedy, Lead Developer at Gapsquare. Ant shares what gets him excited about Gapsquare, the tech behind it, who they are and his professional background and career journey to date.

ADLIB: What gets you excited about working on Gapsquare?

Ant Kennedy: First and foremost the opportunity to work on a technology product and for a company whose mission is to make a positive impact on the world. Alongside there is plenty of opportunities to use the latest technologies around Cloud Native and get involved in all areas of the business from DevOps, Front End, Back End, Data Science, etc. due to the small agile tech team we all get to pitch in in all areas.

ADLIB: What’s the tech behind it?

Ant Kennedy: We are a Cloud Native tech company building our platform atop the shoulders of giants using technologies such as Kuberenetes (based on Google’s Borg cluster management tool) for environment orchestration, Prometheus (Open Sourced from SoundCloud) for monitoring our platform.

On top of this, we are running services written in Golang and frontend in TypeScript/Angular. To support the tech we are running Kanban (for now whilst the tech team is small) and recently established Continuous Delivery into our staging environment and fingers crossed into production later this year.

ADLIB: What has been and is your role at Gapsquare?

Ant Kennedy: My role at Gapsquare so far has been to come in and sure-up Gapsquare’s platform and Development processes in preparation for growing the team in 2019. Alongside this I have been looking at the future of the platform how-how we can leverage Cloud Native tech to help speed up the development lifecycle, and being more Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence into our core product.

ADLIB: How did you get to here, what has been your career journey so far?

Ant Kennedy: I started out rather unceremoniously by failing my A Levels in 6th Form and decided I had the capability to do better but had the wrong attitude. Moving forward I did a BTEC in computing followed by a Computer Science degree.

During my studies and after graduating I worked at Boeing where I had to focus on being a full stack engineer due to the flexible nature of the work the team was required to do from experimentation, software demonstrators to technology transition from Boeing Research & Technology.

Following this, I joined an ML/AI startup Adarga where I joined as Engineer number first building a concept demonstrator followed by growing the engineering team and focusing more on platform architecture.

Finally, I landed in Gapsquare motivated by the company mission to change the world for the better.

ADLIB: Can you pinpoint a key moment or has there been a key person that led you to a career with Technology?

Ant Kennedy: During my BTEC we were assigned a piece of coursework to write a postage stamp calculator, during this coursework (and the frustrations that went along with it) I finally got ‘programming’ and the puzzle solving mentality that goes along with it. Looking back at it now I can safely say that taking that module has changed the direction of my life for the better

ADLIB: If an 8-year-old kid would ask you “Why Should I want to work in Tech?” what would be your response?

Ant Kennedy: So you can help shape the future; the tools you will be helping to build will have an impact on how others work, socialise, shop and generally get things done in both big and small ways.

Thank you for sharing!