Richard Cooper

About

I’m Richard Cooper — a Solution Architect and certified technical trainer with a 30-year track record designing and delivering dotnet enterprise software for major international companies. This is my corner of the web for writing up the things I learn along the way.

What I do

I design systems end to end — application, network, and infrastructure — with a particular focus on:

Most of my career has been spent in insurance and point-of-sale systems, where correctness, auditability, and uptime matter as much as elegant design.

A bit of background

I’ve been at Bennetts since 2012 — through more than one change of ownership — most of it as Solution Architect, where the architecture has been mine to own across application, network, and infrastructure. I lead a multi-discipline team building greenfield, microservice-based sales and policy administration systems — and, among other things, moved our entire infrastructure between providers in under six months with less than two hours of trading downtime.

Before that I worked in architecture at BGL Group, SSP, and EMR Insurance Services — across policy administration, payments and PCI DSS, and document production, with a recurring thread of moving legacy systems onto modern dotnet stacks. My route into software was an unusual one: I started out as a customer service engineer for Canon, installing and servicing semiconductor lithography equipment across Europe, before moving into development and, eventually, architecture.

I hold a BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from UMIST, am a Member of the British Computer Society (MBCS), and a Microsoft and CompTIA Certified Technical Trainer (MCT and CTT+).

Away from the keyboard

A while ago I swapped the commuter belt for West Wales, where most of life away from the study now happens outside it — beach walks, local food, and some of the darkest skies in the country to stargaze under. When I’m indoors I tend to be on the rowing machine: I went sub-seven over 2,000m (a 6:59.2) at the 2024 British Rowing Indoor Championships, good for 14th in the 50–54 category. And I’ve an enduring soft spot for early science fiction, with a paperback collection of 300-plus novels spanning E. E. “Doc” Smith through to Arthur C. Clarke.

How these posts get written

Worth stating plainly, because it matters more to me than most small print does: these posts are drafted with AI assistance.

The shape of it is this. The material is mine — a design decision I had to make, an incident I worked, an argument at work that wouldn’t leave me alone. I bring that along with the position I want to take, and work with an AI model to turn it into a draft. Then I correct what it’s got wrong (which happens, and sometimes twice in one sitting), cut what overreaches, and make the calls that actually decide a post: what it’s really about, what the title is, what stays in, and whether the argument survives contact with my own experience. Nothing goes out that I don’t agree with, and nothing goes out that I haven’t read.

So the honest division is that the experience, the arguments and the judgement are mine, and a good deal of the prose is not. I’d rather write that down than let you assume one way or the other — disclosure being, as far as I’m concerned, part of the deal when you use these tools on anything you put your name to.

Get in touch

The best way to reach me is via the links in the footer. If you spot something I’ve got wrong, or want to talk architecture, I’d be glad to hear from you.