Work
Professional experience, technical areas, and selected projects. Currently at IBM, UK.
Experience
Working within the CICS Transaction Server team on system-level test automation, developer tooling, and feature delivery across the core enterprise product stack. Building and maintaining automated test frameworks exercising JVM servers, Liberty runtime integration, 3270 terminal interactions, and transaction management.
Started at IBM as a consultant, moving between projects and adapting to new technologies as required. Projects spanned chatbot development, open source clearance, and web application delivery, working across the full software lifecycle with teams at IBM and external partners.
Notable work includes building an internal department chatbot using Watson Assistant and Cloud Functions (rolled out to ~800 people), delivering an MVP Career Advisor chatbot in partnership with the Universities of Exeter and Sheffield, and developing management tooling for the ICCVE OpenTec platform using Node.js, AngularJS, and ElasticSearch.
Completed a full honours degree in Electronic Engineering whilst working full-time. Covered microcomputer systems, embedded systems, digital signal processing, data and network communications, radio systems, automation and control, and applied mathematics.
Started out in ATM field service engineering before advancing to become a 3rd line technical support specialist covering the UK and Ireland across several companies. The work covered advanced fault diagnosis, hardware maintenance, account management, and team leadership. This grounding in practical engineering and problem-solving is what eventually led me back into higher education.
Technical areas
CICS & Enterprise Middleware
Deep knowledge of CICS Transaction Server: transaction management, resource definitions, JVM servers, Liberty runtime integration, and 3270 terminal behaviour.
Automated Testing
Framework design and implementation for automated system-level testing. Focused on reliability, repeatability, and making failure diagnosis fast and clear.
CI/CD & Tooling
Build and release pipelines using Jenkins. Scripting and tooling to speed up developer workflows, reduce manual steps, and catch regressions early.
Web & Full-Stack
Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS front-ends, Node.js/Express APIs, SQLite, and Nginx. Self-hosted on Docker with Cloudflare Tunnels. No framework complexity unless genuinely needed.
Infrastructure & Homelab
Synology NAS, Docker Compose, Tailscale mesh networking, Cloudflare DNS. Running personal services reliably on consumer hardware.
Problem Solving
Electronic engineering background means comfort with low-level systems thinking. Good at finding root causes rather than papering over symptoms.
Skills & tooling
Featured projects
keithhinds.co.uk — this site
Architecture write-up →Designed, built, and self-hosted from scratch. Static HTML/CSS/JS with no framework served via Nginx inside Docker. A Node.js/Express API backs the blog with a SQLite database. The whole thing runs on a Synology NAS at home and is exposed to the internet via a Cloudflare Tunnel. No open inbound ports, no cloud hosting bill.
Personal blog platform
Part of this siteA custom blog API built with Node.js and Express, backed by SQLite. Handles post creation, editing, image uploads, and serving posts with server-side computed excerpt and reading time fields. An admin interface lets me write and publish without touching the database directly. The front-end Markdown renderer is hand-rolled: no libraries, handles fenced code blocks, ordered and unordered lists, headings with IDs, and inline formatting.
The interesting design constraint was keeping the whole thing deployable as a single
docker compose up
with no external services, no managed database, and no secrets beyond the Cloudflare tunnel token.
CICS test automation work
IBM internalAt IBM I've built and maintained automated test frameworks for CICS Transaction Server: system-level tests that exercise the full product stack including 3270 terminal interactions, JVM servers, Liberty runtime integration, and transaction management behaviour. The framework runs thousands of test scenarios across multiple CICS configurations and release streams, with test output designed for fast failure triage.
The interesting engineering problems: making test environments reliably reproducible, keeping the test suite fast enough to run in CI without sacrificing coverage, and designing failure output that tells you exactly what went wrong without requiring you to rerun the test in a debugger. Most of the real work is in the infrastructure around the tests, not the tests themselves.
More on GitHub
github.com/khinds-dev →Public repositories covering personal tooling, automation scripts, and smaller web projects. Mostly things built to scratch a specific itch or learn something new.