Employment
The four jobs below are the major ones in my career to date. Other than that I have been involved in a variety of freelance jobs largely in areas around IT for publishing and web consultancy.
2010 Technical Architect, News Corporation
In early 2010 I became the second employee of an internal startup group within News Corporation to build a large scale consumer facing news aggregation site for web, mobile and tablet. We built up an organization of 130 people, and a publishing system and API for multiple clients based around the Day CRX JCR compliant content repository, using Java and Sling, hosted on Linux. The project was managed using agile methods, as a large number of subprojects (different client platforms, common HTML and CSS rendering, API and backend, publisher integration, video etc), with strong focusses on UX, scalability and performance. As one of the two architects, I was involved with hiring, API design, software and vendor selection, working with publishers on integration, making recommendations on product management, interfacing between design and UX, among other areas. The product was nearly ready for the initial launch when it was cancelled for internal (non technical) reasons.
2006-2010 Head of Technology, Squiz UK Ltd
I started at Squiz UK in 2006 when there were ten people working there. During my time there I helped the company grow to over 40 people with a turnover of £2m, through profitable internally funded growth. The company moved from selling small website projects to delivering large scale solutions to global companies, based on their open source content management system.
This role was a very broad position, covering operations, product development, consultancy, managing developers, sales and being part of the senior management team.
I ran the product development team in the UK, working closely with the team in Australia, working to turn client requests into generic product features, improve usability, and improve developer productivity. I switched the development from client specific work to improving the core product in generic reusable ways, and encouraged all the developers to become more involved in product development issues. I hired the developers on the team, and trained them on the tecnhical side of the product, and mentored them.
I was the senior consultant, directly involved in all of the pure consultancy projects, and with all the larger clients, bringing a broad knowledge of business processes and IT, and the web. Clients included World Duty Free during the demerger from BAA, Shelter, the Institute of Actuaries, Hargreaves Lansdown. I managed (and hired) the technical project managers who ran the web delivery teams, and worked very closely with them on methods, QA and testing, standardisation, project reviews, staff developent and training. I also managed the operational team, ad was closely involved in operational issues.
I was frequently involved on the technical side of the sales process, providing technical backup to the sales team and meeting with the technical teams of potential clients, for example the World Health Organization, EMAP, Westminster University and many more, and was closely involved in the management of the growing company, and the restructuring that the growth required. We moved to a structure of smaller teams gradually as the company grew, and I worked with the new team leaders to improve prooject delivery, internal communications and client communications. I was also been closely involved in hiring and budgeting decisions, and in managing resourcing, costing and quoting for projects.
1998-2006 Co-founder Street Vision Ltd
Street Vision was a startup involved in large scale graphics technology for billboards and similar technologies. The largest projects were the the replacement of the neon and projector based displays in Piccadilly Circus in London with LED based screens running 24/7 for Coca-Cola and Samsung. I developed high availability Linux based systems for streaming multiple HD video streams combined with interactive content such as football results and generated 3D graphics, combined with 24/7 monitoring and failover.
1993-1995 Investment Manager, Guinness Flight Global Asset Management
I started working at Guinness Flight in a one year placement before university in 1988, and came back later as an investment manager in the fixed income department, specialising in global currency markets and high field fixed income investment and emerging markets. I also worked on front office technology tools which were later spun out into a company called ThinkFolio. Guinness Flight was a spinoff from the investment department of a merchant bank that was later bought by Investec, and was my first experience of working in a small, fast growing company.
Education
MA Cambridge University in Economics 1991
MSc Imperial College in Computer Science 1996
Technology
I have a broad experience of many technical areas, both within the field of content management and web technologies and in wider areas, and I am passionate in mentoring people and helping them use and understand unfamiliar technologies. I am familiar also with the issues of working with open source developers both in community and commercial projects.
Recently my primary experience is with the MySource Matrix web content management system, based on Linux Apache, PHP, Postgres and Oracle, the Day CRX content repository, serverside Javascript with Node.js, and with front end projects involving HTML, CSS, Javascript and Ajax, both for browser and for mobile platforms. I have a long term background in Unix and Linux programming and system administration, including kernel and network programming. I am also interested in agile software development, including areas such as DevOps, continuous deployment and test driven development.