Summary
Paul Waring is a pragmatic technology leader and hands-on freelance PHP developer and Linux system administrator with 15+ years’ experience delivering secure, maintainable systems for sectors from insurance and academia to manufacturing. As Director of IT and Chief Security Officer and a long-standing freelance consultant, he blends board-level commercial judgment—having served as director of multiple companies and charities—with day-to-day engineering skills like PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, Git, Ansible and automated deployments. He’s trusted with sensitive financial and personal data, proactively raising security, compliance and business-continuity issues and advising independently with no vendor ties. Comfortable operating in imperfect environments, he specialises in practical, low-friction solutions (including adapting to legacy constraints such as FTP-only hardware) and mentoring teams in version control and configuration management. Educated at the University of Manchester (Computer Science) and building his first commercial site in 2001, Paul pairs deep technical craft with clear, jargon-free communication that trustees and technical teams alike rely on.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
MPhil Computer Science, MPhil Computer Science at The University of Manchester