apprenticeships

These are important.

Apprenticeships are a way for employers to receive government funding to train individuals who wish to start a career. Unlike University Degrees, they do not leave people with massive debt, high-interest rates, and no guarantee of a job. While I took the University Degree route myself, if done well, Apprenticeships are far more able to successfully kick a career off.

I was involved in creating a new Apprenticeship Standard, addressing the problems our friends in the public sector found with the content in the existing Software Developer standard. The result was the DevOps Engineer standard.

made Tech Academy

I led the Made Tech Academy for three cohorts of 6 people. Unlike other boot camps, we paid every single one of them a salary to be there.

Learning cultures

A strong culture centred around learning is absolutely essential to strong digital delivery teams. The team at Made Tech has spent quite a bit of time putting together various resources around leading technology practices, such as Test-Driven Development.

What do I do?

While I am attending those video calls, I am an experienced hands-on leader of technical teams with a track record of delivering outcomes while also growing talent.

I help individuals orient their work around the product strategy. A few of the ways I do this is

• lowering the barrier to entry for team members to engage with the product strategy, ensuring a more collaborative environment

• helping teams recognise architectural patterns that will rapidly deliver a backlog

• breaking down myths that surround counterintuitive technical approaches

• working closely with budget holders and stakeholders, asking difficult questions and setting honest expectations

My background

Some say the measure of experience is how many mistakes you have made, so I’ll try to draw attention to the ones where the bruise has mostly healed.

I started out as an independent software developer for a local property company, while I was still at school. With a friend from school, I built an online rent and online account system for their student letting business. This was only decommissioned ten years after going into production. Back then we edited that project by ssh’ing into the production server and editing the source code in vim. Absolutely no source control. It was pretty wild.

As you can probably imagine, the software was quite volatile, and was regularly in various states of broken.

Besides writing software for that property company, I spent time doing property inspections, weeding driveways, procuring boilers and baths… I learned the importance of immersing yourself in the domain.

I then went off to university, and found myself doing a year in industry at Clear Books - accounting software. This is where I learned a lot of modern software development practices, like how to actually do version control, but was quickly contributing to a number of in-house tooling around how the application was delivered on the web.

Being in London, I became a member of a number of agile communities, read lots of books, and also watched a lot of online training courses. Through self study, and by locating mentors through those communities, I went on to introduce TDD, Hexagonal Architecture and Kanban to the team at Clear Books. This took the team (and myself!) from one that regularly introduced defects to production, to a team that was actively finding defects in tax law (CIS, I’m looking at you), and PHP standard library (mcrypt I’m looking at you).

I went on to lead software development for Clear Book’s venture into the Netherlands market, one which didn’t end successfully, but I learned a tonne about what not to do in a fragile startup environment. Know your competition and do an analysis of your comparative strengths and weaknesses before planning your roadmap. Also, maybe consider billing your clients manually if you have less than a 100.

In 2016, I joined Made Tech. Back then we had a lot of private sector clients, and I worked closely with AkzoNobel/Dulux for over a year. Acting as technical lead for the global digital eCommerce checkout, order back-office and logistics domains. This was quite a complicated engagement, with many vendors involved and a tonne of legacy software.

As a bit of an interlude, I also took on the role of Delivery Manager for about half a year. Handing over technical leadership to one of my colleagues. This was an eye opening experience for me, and absolutely gave me a renewed appreciation for Delivery Managers.

Towards the end of the engagement, I led a low-budget project to detangle the handling of B2C orders from the organisation’s B2B orders. This was ultimately unsuccessful due to non-technical reasons. Silos and conflicting goals are a real pain in large organisations. I am unsure we could have discovered this any other way, but it would have been nice to not have needed to write a line of code to get there. It gave the people responsible for B2C/Digital arm some knowledge that they can use to affect change over a longer period of time.

I have gone on to lead the Made Tech Academy for over a year, provide advice to numerous government departments on their talent growth plans, mentored (and learned from) the teams here at Made Tech and worked on a committee to define a new Apprenticeship standard.

Most recently I kicked off a legacy migration discovery project for something vital for everyone in this country (that’s all I will say), and worked in the multi-vendor environment that is HMRC’s MDTP platform acting as Principal for the account for Made Tech.

If you’ve read all that, and you still like the sound of working with me, great!