Heidi

Cloud-ops Engineer

Who are you and what do you do?

Hello! I’m Heidi, a 21-year-old cloud-ops engineer at Dassault Systèmes. I was born and raised in Northampton (NN4, although I live in NN1 now). As of June 2026, I have just under 4 years of professional experience working in cloud. I have been messing with tech in some capacity for as long as I can remember.

Heidi portrait

What first got you into tech?

Not that I can remember, but I apparently started using computers around 2 years old. The first time I can remember really questioning how technology worked was when I was trying to use the Nintendo eShop at 6 years old and discovered WiFi existed. I was also probably one of the first iPad kids: I got an iPad 2 for my 7th birthday.

Where I really got into tech was running Minecraft servers. I was running them on AWS EC2 when I was around 12. Strangely, I was more interested in the marketing side of it and used to do freelance graphic design for other servers. At that point, I thought graphic design was going to be my career.

However, when I got taught print("Hello World") in my first GCSE computer science lesson, I had a sudden change in career aspiration. 14-year-old me was very sure I’d be a software engineer.

When I was 16, I built a load of random stuff that was much better than it had any right to be. I started contributing to open-source and getting really into the online developer community.

But then I got a job and I struggled to make time for programming or the community. My first job at 17 was a technical sales internship at IBM Cloud. I came in with a lot of self-taught experience, had a really good time and learned a tonne. It was only a year-long posting and I moved on to IBM’s degree apprenticeship scheme.

That also meant a move into IBM Consulting. I joined the NHS ESR project and quickly ended up fixing and owning some fairly important infrastructure. Over the next couple of years, I built up trust and was eventually given the task of automating the deployment of a large piece of infrastructure. I disagreed with the architects on an aspect of the solution and was given the opportunity to present my idea to the client. The client agreed and, after that, I ended up driving a lot of the architecture and implementing most of the solution myself.

I recently moved into a mid-level cloud operations role at Dassault Systèmes and I’m really enjoying it so far. It’s kind of funny to me that I have gone full circle back to AWS.

What does your typical working day look like?

I started my current job 1 month ago, joining a brand-new team. Our main goal is to keep the Dassault Systèmes UK sovereign cloud reliable and operational. At the moment, I spend a lot of time reading docs, understanding the platform and turning that into useful operational knowledge. A typical day can involve checking service health, investigating alerts, debugging platform issues, writing docs and working with the wider French team when something needs deeper platform knowledge.

What’s your setup? Software and hardware. Pictures welcomed!

  • M4 MacBook Air as my main dev machine.
  • PC I built myself in 2018 for gaming.
  • Sennheiser HD6XX for music.
  • Keyboard I built around the Zoo65.
  • Fully Jarvis desk I managed to get on the cheap when they went out of business.
  • IKEA chair.

I use NixOS, macOS, Neovim, Firefox, Safari, Spotify and Discord.

What’s the last piece of work you feel proud of?

sdkmode, an experiment in letting LLM agents use real SDKs directly instead of relying entirely on tool calls.

What’s one thing about your profession you wish more people knew?

There is a difference between Agile and agile.

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Published: 7/10/2026