Meet the Team: Q&A with Paul Grant, Systems Lead
Meet Paul, the Systems Lead at Nublue. In this Meet the Team Q&A, Paul explains what a "fixer" actually does, how the industry has changed over 15 years, and why clients trust us not to walk away from a problem.
By Maddi Nuttall
Paul Grant has been at Nublue since 2009, starting in Support and moving into infrastructure in 2011. A former carpenter turned Systems Administrator, he's the person we call when a problem seems impossible. This Q&A features Paul, he talks about his unusual route into hosting, the hardest client issues he's solved, and why AI could turn sysadmins into shepherds.
About Paul
Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your role at Nublue?
Hi, I'm Paul and I'm one of the Systems Administrators at Nublue. I've worked for Nublue since 2009 (when servers were servers!) starting in Support and moving to the infrastructure side in 2011 where I've been for the last 15 years.
I'm responsible for the underlying maintenance and development of the Nublue platform and the backing infrastructure (Centralised DNS, Backups, Security).
How did you end up working in Systems? Was it always the plan?
Being quite old this is a long story! I dropped out of University wanting to do something physical and hands-on and trained as a carpenter, moving into a wood machinist role in 1995 making bespoke kitchen cabinets and living room furniture. I realised the error of a job in manufacturing in about 2004 and started retraining as a Java Programmer, in 2006 as a stop-gap I got a role in IT Hosting Support and absolutely loved the challenge and variation. This eventually lead me to Nublue and to System Administration.
What did you do before joining Nublue, and what made you want to make the move?
Before working for Nublue I worked as a team leader for a large telecoms company in Preston. Going back to hands-on hosting and IT support was the main draw for Nublue, but I also knew a few members of staff and knew how the hosting side of the business was growing fast, in the years after I joined our customer base more than quadrupled and kept growing.
Paul's role at Nublue
What does a typical week look like for you?
I work across the business managing a small team that covers Nublue Systems Administration, day to day we are meeting clients virtually to align with their needs and goals, provisioning and updating infrastructure and taking gnarly escalations from the Support team.
What kind of problems are you most often brought in to solve for clients?
The hardest ones! I’m usually brought in when a bespoke solution is needed, be it for the infrastructure itself, or an issue exists that its been impossible to resolve.
What's your favourite part of the job?
I’m a fixer, making something work that didn’t, or making a thing work better than it did are what keeps me going. What I’m probably most proud of is eking the most performance out of the smaller server instances that we provide for maximum cost/performance benefit.
Expertise in the industry
What's the biggest shift you've seen in Systems Administration over the last few years?
System Administration is a constantly evolving field and has changed massively in the 15 years I’ve been involved in it. The broadening of the roles within the industry are probably the biggest change over the years, there’s now not just System Administrators, but Cyber Security Teams, Dev Ops Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers.
The next biggest shift we’ll see is likely to be around AI, and is likely to see us turning into shepherds of a herd of AI agents doing the actual work we’d normally where we can’t automate.
What do you wish more clients understood about systems?
The sheer complexity of modern software and OSes is such that its hard to be an expert in every area now due to the plethora of different stacks and different architectural approaches, and this is only expanding!
What does great look like in your field, and how do you know when you've nailed it?
Ultimately as we aim to automate as much as we can (and as above Agentic AI will take us to the next level with this) then great looks like acting rather than reacting/responding. Where the day to day is fully automated and we’re only needed for the outliers and our time is spent researching and improving our infrastructure.
What's one thing Nublue does differently that genuinely sets us apart?
Our clients trust us. We don’t give up and walk away from an issue or push it back entirely on the client. We may not be able to resolve all issues (as some have in the past required developer time and or a significant increase in resources) but we work with our clients to if not resolve then identify solutions for an issue.
We identified a poorly performing PHP library for a specific client which when removed resulted in significantly improved performance and lower costs (as this was a paid for library), this required load testing and tracing of the overall PHP performance over time.
A bit more about Paul
Outside of work, what are you into?
If I go outside of work my kids are waiting… ones a frying pan and one is definitely a fire!