About Me

Culture is the most important thing in my eyes, a company’s culture is the lens that all decisions are made through. My focus is always on creating a culture of trust, empathy and focus. I help teams concentrate on what truly matters: delivering working, valuable software.

With a solid technical background, I can quickly build trust with technical teams through guiding implementations, addressing technical debt and driving innovation. I bring high energy and enthusiasm, fostering a collaborative and enjoyable environment where everyone can do their best work.

My leadership style is all about empowering teams, encouraging innovation, and achieving great results together.

Experience

Head of Development

Apr 2023 - Present
3t Digital | Newcastle

At 3t Digital, I was promoted to lead 6 teams with 23 remote first Developers, QAs and Technical Leads in multiple locations, specifically Eastern Europe, UK and India. I supported the team with technical delivery, system design and coaching. I was also a key point of contact for supporting directly with customer calls, demos and technical expertise.

Responsibilities:

  • Managing both in-house and offshore contractor resources
  • Implementing scaled agile methodologies to fit multiple teams
  • Guiding development practices and coaching 6 team leads
  • Exploring and supporting proof of concept development
  • Providing oversight and an escalation point for personal and technical issues
  • Ensuring throughput balanced with quality and reliability
  • Collaboration with product teams for roadmap design and delivery expertise

Key Projects:

  • Implementing Dora Metrics: I set up metrics to track and boost our development performance, increasing our deployment frequency from a couple of times a month to over 60 deployments in the same time period.
  • Establishing a support strategy from scratch: I built a solid support strategy to manage software maintenance and troubleshooting, ensuring minimal disruption for our users while maintaining developer throughput.
  • Delivering the new platform’s Minimum Marketable Product (MMP): Together with the CTO, Head of Product, and Head of Architecture, I spearheaded the development of a greenfield platform. This initiative enabled the migration of initial customers with basic needs, laying the foundation for future enhancements.
  • Implementing a skills assessment foundation for all technical roles: Using SFIA as the framework, I aligned the expectations of every technical role in the company and provided the tools for self-assessment and discussions with team leads. This effort led to two promotions from within the existing teams.

Technical Lead

Sep 2022 - Apr 2023
3t Digital | Newcastle

In my role as Technical Lead at 3t, I was tasked with transitioning a legacy .NET team of 3 developers and a QA to embrace cloud-based serverless technologies. Later, I lead the central platform team, focusing on providing a vital backbone to a brand new platform.

Responsibilities:

  • Overseeing both front-end and backend development
  • Guiding a monolithic .NET team towards serverless technologies
  • Leading a team of developers and testers
  • Delivering software solutions as part of larger projects

Key projects:

  • Competency Assessment Form Sync: I automated the synchronization of assessment forms, enhancing data accuracy and efficiency using serverless technologies within a legacy system.
  • Implementing a foundation for Micro-frontends: I laid down a scalable architecture for independent front-end deployments, using a custom build root front end and stencil web component libraries.
  • Implementing Feature flagging: I enabled controlled feature rollouts and reduced dependencies for technical and product releases using Launch Darkly.
  • Implementing Low code admin dashboard (Retool): I developed a customizable admin interface to streamline internal operations by adapting system APIs and processes, saving months of developer effort.
  • Refactor POC authentication and authorization systems: I improved the security and performance of authentication processes by refactoring the initial proof of concept that became load-bearing.

Technical Lead

Jun 2021 - Sep 2022
WorkCast | Houghton-le-Spring

My focus at WorkCast was modernizing the webinar/virtual event platform and leading the cross functional product and platform team in resolving large amounts of technical debt written during a frantic boom phase caused by the COVID-19 pandemic while maintaining feature delivery.

Responsibilities:

  • Led full-stack web development teams implementing a strangler approach to modernizing the webinar platform
  • Improved system reliability and performance with modern software practices
  • Developed technical strategies around automation and increasing long-term development velocity
  • Managed hiring and team development transitioning from .NET to TypeScript
  • Built internal developer tooling for continuous integration and testing

Key projects:

  • Implementing an innovation initiative: Created a space for developers to explore and prototype new technologies and features, leading to several successful implementations including a new video editor
  • Modernizing platform release process: Introduced automated testing and deployment pipelines, reducing release time from weeks to hours
  • Transitioning on-premises server applications to the cloud: Successfully migrated legacy .NET applications to AWS cloud services, improving scalability and reducing operational costs
  • Open source Event-based Test helper: Created and published an open-source testing library for event-driven architectures, simplifying integration testing and improving test coverage across the platform

Agile Delivery Lead

Aug 2020 - Jun 2021
Causeway Technologies | Middlesbrough

As an Agile Delivery Lead at Causeway Technologies, I managed two cross-functional teams consisting of 8 .NET developers and 2 QA engineers and a product owner. There was approximately a 50/50 split between UK and India based developers. I acted as both Scrum Master and Delivery Manager, facilitating agile ceremonies while ensuring successful project delivery.

Responsibilities:

  • Manage Scrum process and ceremonies, including backlog collaboration and sprint goal setting
  • Assess and coach team on Agile maturity, supporting release planning and improving Scrum application
  • Provide leadership, resolve conflicts, and foster a high-performing team environment
  • Conduct regular team meetings, one-on-one sessions, and mentor team members in their professional development

Delivery Team Leader

Feb 2019 - Aug 2020
Leighton | Houghton-le-Spring

As Delivery Team Leader, my time was split between managing a team of 5 developers split between external client contract work and bespoke product development and acting as technical lead for a number of projects, including delivering an internal expenses platform written from the ground up.

Responsibilities:

  • Support head of development with enforcing best practices for software delivery
  • Conducting performance reviews
  • Managing team priorities
  • Technical leadership and support
  • Leading technical and cultural interviews
  • Leading Agile and Scrum ceremonies
  • Maintaining team morale
  • Technical evaluation of external tools for internal and client use

Software Engineer

Apr 2018 - Feb 2019
Leighton | Houghton-le-Spring

As a Software Engineer, I initially started working as a contractor for British Airways working on changes required by the GDPR legislation. I then moved across to working with the Custom Software Business Unit delivering a new entry platform for the Great Run Company.

Responsibilities:

  • Working in an Agile team to deliver bespoke solutions
  • Taking part in Agile ceremonies
  • Coaching Junior Developers and performing code reviews
  • Delivering quality web applications through fullstack development
  • Providing Technical estimates
  • Technical solutioning
  • Taking part in customer demos and implementing feedback

Lead Plant Mobile Applications Developer

Dec 2017 - Apr 2018
Sabisu | Redcar

As an Agile Delivery Lead at Causeway Technologies, I managed two cross-functional teams consisting of .NET developers and QA engineers. I acted as both Scrum Master and Delivery Manager, facilitating agile ceremonies while ensuring successful project delivery.

Responsibilities:

  • Native and hybrid mobile Development
  • Supporting junior developers learning Android development
  • Supporting the rollout of handheld devices with hardware and software support
  • Bespoke system design working with Business Analysts
  • Deadline driven delivery with tight timescales and dependencies

Applications Developer

May 2016 - Dec 2017
Sabisu | Redcar

After completing my final year, I was hired by a company with close ties to SABIC into their team focused on providing bespoke solutions to multiple petrochemical companies based around Redcar.

Responsibilities:

  • Fullstack development working on multiple projects in a given week
  • Answering and following up on support calls
  • Traveling directly to customers for demos and workshops
  • Bespoke system design working with Business Analysts
  • Working with manual Regression and System testing

Junior Applications Developer

Jun 2014 - Sep 2015
SABIC | Redcar

I was selected with another student for a placement year at SABIC in Redcar, we were the sole full-stack web developers responsible for maintaining inhouse efficiency tooling and working within the Automation team to create new software automation solutions.

Responsibilities:

  • Fixing bugs and maintaining legacy .NET 3.5 systems available to 100+ site staff
  • Providing Technical support to less savy plant workers
  • Providing solutions for process automation working with an internal Business Analyst
  • Assessing and delivering internal stakeholder requirements in Business intelligence platforms

Certifications

Certified ScrumMaster

2020
Scrum Alliance

Certified ScrumMaster certification from Scrum Alliance

Projects

I enjoy building side projects to explore new technologies and solve interesting problems. Here are some from the last couple of years I'm particularly proud of:

Event Driven Toolkit - A developer tool built to help teams work with AWS EventBridge events more easily. It provides a clean interface for triggering and monitoring event streams, built using Tauri and SST.
Who Would Win in a Fight? - A fun project where I experimented with ChatGPT's API and SST. Users can pit any two fighters against each other and get AI-generated predictions of who would win.
My CV Site - Built from an open-source Jekyll template, enhanced with BitBucket CI and AWS hosting to create this interactive version of my CV.

Technical Skills

Javascript/Typescript

AWS Serverless Development

SQL/PosgreSQL

AWS Infastricture

CI/CD

Dynamo DB

React/Stencil