The Tactics for Tech Leadership podcast is long-form, deep dives into topics relevant to new or experienced technical leaders from team leads all the way to the C-suite. Each episode is packed full of insights and tactics to help leaders understand, build, and grow software organisations.

I coach experienced software engineers on how to become experienced leaders and managers. You can engage me for one-to-one mentoring and coaching, group sessions, or engage me to take up the reigns in your organisation on an interim or fractional basis.

I brought together a team of engineers and data scientists to create predictive analytics of primary capital markets. I coached the team on self-organising around the work, taking part in objective setting (briefing/back-briefing), and tracking work from research through to production. I guided the team on organising data to address biases that can creep in from improperly handling it and worked on steps to address these problems using event sourcing.

I coached, mentored, hired, and coordinated the team that built and ran the largest independent alpha capture platform. Along with the CTO, I transformed the department from static teams with leads as managers to self-organised teams with self-managed individuals. Through two acquisitions (Acuris and ION Group), my guidance and coaching maintained the team's cohesion and kept turnover remained low (~1 person per year) over a 3 year period.After incidents both large and small, I conducted Incident Analyses (Root Cause Analyses) involving both technical and non-technical stakeholders. These resulted in many process and tooling changes, which reduced the likelihood of the problems recurring. Organised and lead the work to migrate from Puppet-configured VMs to containers in Kubernetes. Trained developers on Kubernetes and Prometheus. Added Kubernetes support to the company's tool for deploying applications. This eased the migration by enabling the application's various services to live either in VMs, in Kubernetes, or in both at the same time. The infrastructure became simpler to manage and provided a path to using cloud services (such as EKS).

Lead engineer and manager for one of the IMS One development teams. Worked with the team to define and execute development processes. Trained developers on operations and configuration management concepts. Worked with product management to clarify technical possibilities and options.

Team Lead on Puppet, Facter, and Hiera from versions 3.0.0 until 3.4 at which point the group grew and I became lead for the server-side components (Hiera, Puppet Server, Puppet Language, and various other components). Guided development and decision making on fundamental changes to the Puppet Language. Worked to ensure the the project team was cross functional by including QA and other specialties in as many day to day activities as possible. Set up processes and guidance to interact with open source contributors.

Guide development on the TIM Funds platform and product. Mentor and train other developers on the team. Assist client managers with technical problems. Provide technical help on sales calls.

Worked in a team of four interns to create a prototype storage automation system.

My main responsibility was to develop a community and e-commerce site using Perl, mod_perl, and Oracle. I also introduced the use of developer written unit tests for all code written and brought in other Extreme Programming practices (pair programming, story cards for planning, engineering tasks for work management).

Administered Linux web servers and created web pages for internal use with perl.

Created CSS and XSLT to display XML formatted language learning exercises in browsers.