What I do

I’ve been part of the web development industry since 2002; mostly leading a team of coders. I’ve got a lot of experience making engaging and experiential websites and web-based products, and working with live and interactive film; I believe that if what you’re building doesn’t work for the end user then you may as well not be building it.

Creating the highest quality output relies on having the best people and allowing them to do their best work. I advocate for my team, helping them learn and develop their careers while educating others on how to get the most out of them.

I’m not just a manager; I’m an experienced developer who likes to get my hands dirty. I’m opinionated but open minded about technical decisions and I encourage my team to build their decision-making skills by confronting their biases to make their decisions defensible.

I’m a believer that the boring stuff should be automated where possible and default approaches worked out everywhere else so that everyone can concentrate on the interesting problems, not which type of issue sizing approach to take.

I set up an RFC process at Signal Noise to collaboratively document defaults to things, and built tools to automate the worst time-sucks: deploybot makes CI quick and easy on studio projects, while laundromat allows non-technical people to commit spreadsheets to the repository with a few clicks.

These days, I spend a lot of time with React and Django, and running systems on Ubuntu, AWS and GCP. For a full history check out my LinkedIn profile or see my GitHub profile to look at some of my publicly visible code.

I have several personal projects; an interstellar route calculator (for planning your journey!), and homemade kimchi are the most recent. I’ve automated my home with Z-Wave, LightwaveRF and the Raspberry Pi, and have an ongoing mapping project in the works too.