Charlotte Bailey, CEO
Yes, I met him at a gig. Yes, he was on drums. And yes, I used to work with his sister — who also happens to be in the band.
Every now and then, a hire walks into your life through the side door — or in this case, through the stage door of a local rock gig.
I’d worked with Blake’s sister in a previous role, so when she invited me along to see her band play, I didn’t expect to discover our future cloud expert behind the drum kit. There he was — in full rock mode — keeping perfect time with a mix of technical precision and pure chaos energy. It all made sense later.
When Blake joined Panintelligence, it wasn’t with a snare and cymbals (though I’m sure they weren’t far behind), but with that same restless curiosity and creative rhythm — this time channelled into cloud infrastructure, DevOps tooling, and whatever shiny new AWS thing had dropped that week.
Around here, we affectionately call him The Magpie — not just because he loves shiny, new things (though he does), but because he’s always tinkering, exploring, and experimenting with the latest in cloud tooling.
But here’s the twist: beyond the love of shiny things, Blake’s the kind of person you want in your corner when things get technically messy. He’s built, scaled, secured and optimised cloud infrastructure for us and our customers, while making it feel... easy. Calm. Even fun.
He’s the drummer who keeps time when things go offbeat. The cloud architect who can talk Terraform and time signatures. And the kind of colleague who makes both platforms and people better.
So here he is — musician, Magpie, and modern cloud maestro — in his own words...
A Day in the Life of Blake Wilkinson: Drums, Dashboards, and Debugging in the Cloud
Hi, I’m Blake — Panintelligence’s resident Magpie, cloud enthusiast, drummer, and occasional breaker-of-things-in-the-name-of-progress.
People often ask what I actually do in a day, which is a fair question. My official job title involves words like “cloud,” “architecture,” and “DevOps,” but what that really means is this:
I make sure the infrastructure that supports our product and customers runs smoothly, scales properly, and doesn't burst into flames when someone clicks "deploy".
Here’s a peek at what a typical day looks like — assuming nothing explodes (yet).
08:17 – Caffeine, Commits, and Curious Alerts
I’m not a 5am jogger. I’m more of a coffee and cloud console person.
I usually start by scanning Teams and checking our monitoring dashboards. If it’s quiet, great — if not, I’m straight into AWS, cloudwatch logs, or debugging a deployment script that decided it no longer wants to work just because.
On WFH days, I’m accompanied by the true boss of the house — Dexter, my cat — who likes to sit squarely on the keyboard the moment anything important is happening.
(A very paws-on approach to pair programming.)
09:30 – Daily Stand-Up (and 3 Tabs I Forgot to Close)
The stand-up with the team is quick — we share blockers, priorities, and updates. I usually have something like:
“Yesterday I refactored the deployment pipeline for multi-tenant clients… and also fell down a rabbit hole with OpenTelemetry tracing. It was worth it.”
There’s also a 100% chance I have at least three tabs open that I can’t explain but refuse to close. Just in case.
10:00 – Customer Time: Scaling Stuff Without the Stress
A lot of my work is hands-on with customers — especially those deploying Panintelligence into their own environments.
Whether it’s helping them set up secure cloud infrastructure, optimising performance, or integrating into their datalakes, it’s about making the clever stuff feel usable — not intimidating.
I like to think of it as translating Cloud into English (with a light Yorkshire accent).
12:30 – Lunch Break / Drum Break / Cat Crisis
If it’s a work-from-home day, I’ll usually grab something quick and, if no one’s around, sneak in a few minutes on the drum kit. It’s oddly satisfying bashing out a 7/8 time signature after a morning of error logs and IAM policy fun.
The cat will typically choose this time to knock something off a shelf or stare at me like I’m slacking off. Classic management behaviour.
14:00 – Building Stuff (and Occasionally Breaking It First)
Afternoons are typically deep work blocks — building out new infrastructure, optimising cost performance, testing scaling scenarios, or tweaking dashboards for internal or partner usage.
I’m a firm believer in "build it, break it, then make it bulletproof." If something isn’t working, I want to know why, not just patch it.
16:00 – Dev Chat, Dashboards, and Supporting the Squad
Towards the end of the day, I sync with the dev team on infrastructure changes, discuss anything exciting (read: unstable) I’ve been experimenting with, or jump in to support with releases.
Sometimes that means building something new. Sometimes it means sitting with someone and unpicking a tricky issue together. Either way — it’s hands-on, and it’s collaborative.
17:30 – Close the Tabs (Well, Some of Them)
I do my best to log off properly — but the truth is, if I’ve got a personal project on the go or a new tool I’m obsessed with, I might spend a bit more time tinkering.
The cat clocks off exactly at 17:00, by the way. Union rules.
That’s part of what I love about this role. Cloud’s always changing. And I get to change with it.
Final Thought: Stay Curious (and Keep the Beat)
Whether it’s building infrastructure, helping a partner troubleshoot, or seeing our platform scale to thousands of users — I get a real kick out of solving problems that matter.
Plus, any job that lets you write Terraform in the morning and play drums by night? Not bad at all.
If you ever want to talk containers, cost optimisation, or complicated prog rock time signatures — you know where to find me.
(Unless the cat’s on the keyboard. Then give it a minute.)
