Darryl Cauldwell
Enterprise architect with 30+ years in IT, from soldering circuit boards at Royal Mail in 1994 to designing multi-cloud architectures at VMware today. The thread through it all: figuring out how to make complex systems work reliably at scale, and then automating away the repetitive parts so you can focus on the interesting problems.
Along the way I've progressed through hands-on engineering, automation, DevOps, and product management across Royal Mail, CSC, Atos, DXC Technology, and VMware. Recognised as a VMware vExpert for 11 consecutive years, with 50+ certifications and 12 industry awards. For the full professional history, see my CV.
Personal Projects
Outside of work I build things. Five iOS apps on the App Store and four self-hosted web applications, all designed, built, and shipped as side projects.
The iOS apps cover everything from tetrathlon and eventing training with gait detection (TetraTrack) to real-time UK train departures (LiveRail), family meal planning (TableTogether), cheapest fuel routing (FuelRoute), and a Silicon Valley parody hotdog classifier (SeeFood). All built with SwiftUI, Swift Testing, and published through automated CI/CD pipelines.
On the web side, Equestrian Venue Manager is a full production system handling arena bookings, livery services, staff scheduling, and horse health records with Stripe payments and DocuSign contracts. EquiCalendar aggregates competitions from 26 sources across UK equestrian sport into a single searchable calendar. Planespotter tracks live aircraft positions using ADS-B data. GreenScope calculates software carbon intensity scores for the hosting infrastructure.
Everything runs on a single Digital Ocean droplet orchestrated with Docker Compose, behind Caddy for automatic HTTPS across all subdomains. Full observability stack with Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki.
Open Source
All projects are on GitHub. Early contributions include Ansible modules for VMware ESXi and vSAN management that were published during the CSC BizCloud work. More recently, the focus has been on the app projects above — each repo includes CI pipelines, automated testing, and containerised deployment.
I've been writing a technical blog since 2013, covering cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, VMware, automation, and the development process behind these personal projects.
Community
Active member of the VMware Sustainability Ambassadors since 2019, focused on carbon footprint measurement and power-aware workload placement. Member of the UN Global Compact UK Network since 2017, collaborating on Sustainability and Development Goals.
In 2014, I volunteered with Team4Tech in Tanzania, developing a digital literacy teacher training programme for five rural villages as part of World Vision International's 'Spark a Child's Digital Future' initiative.
In 2018, I contributed to a local history research project that produced two books and a ceramic sculpture commemorating the 100th anniversary of World War I, studying the effects of the war on daily life in our small farming community.
Beyond Work
My family and I share a love of travel, particularly in Africa — my wife and I got married in Zanzibar. I once spent a few months travelling independently through Peru and Bolivia, which remains one of the best decisions I've made.
When I'm not at my desk, you'll find me walking the moors with our three Springer Spaniels or acting as groom and driver for my daughter's Irish Sports Horse, who competes at British Showjumping.