Profile

30 years experience in infrastructure, software development, architecture and leadership. A fast learner with excellent problem solving skills and a passion for making people and technology work together.

Open Source Development

TotallyLazy (Creator)

Functional Programming library for Java

UtterlyIdle (Creator)

RESTfull web framework for Java

Yadic (Co-creator)

Tiny and super fast DI tool for Java and .NET

Yatspec (Co-creator)

Self documenting tests for Java

LazyRecords (Creator)

Think LINQ for Java

JCompilo (Creator)

Advanced Java compiler and build tool

More ...

My GitHub Organisation

Presentations / Awards

2012 Agile Awards Winner

Most Valuable Agile Innovation (The 10-Second Build)

QCon: The 10 Second Build

Slides and Video

Experience

June 2022 - Present

Chief Technology Officer, Triptease, London

As CTO at Triptease I balance strategic leadership with a hands-on technical approach. I drive vendor negotiations, cloud cost optimization, and oversee audits, security, and compliance, while mentoring teams through performance reviews and career development. Simultaneously, I remain engaged in product and architectural reviews, squad collaborations, and pairing sessions.

I dedicate a portion of my role to advancing AI/ML adoption. Internally, I drive initiatives that boost developer productivity with the latest tools like Cursor, Windsurf, Warp and Goose, while externally, I explore how to seamlessly integrate LLM advancements—such as constrained decoding and GraphRAG—to make better "thinking" models for our products.

January 2018 - June 2022

Principal Software Engineer, Triptease, London

As Principal Engineer at Triptease, I led the transformation of a neglected, manual integration process—handling hundreds of client and thousands of hotel setups—into a robust, highly automated system.

By leveraging static data analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning with human oversight, my team dramatically reduced errors and built a reliable foundation that now supports all product teams.

The machine learning models we developed were optimized for resource-constrained mobile devices: models trained in Python and inferencing in TypeScript to enable real-time, human-like page interpretation without manual intervention.

January 2016 - December 2017

Principal Software Engineer, Springer Nature, London

I worked on a brand new recommendations service for the Springer Nature Group. The service's goal was to help scientists and researchers keep abreast of the 4k new articles published every day in science. The project started as an MVP and continuously experimented both with user features and technology. All features were A/B tested and metrics used to help inform the project direction. The service was a holistic approach to product development, UX, visual design, software development and algorithm design where everyone on the team mucked in.

Summary of practices:

A/B testing, Hypothesis Driven Development, Data over opinions, System thinking, Pain Driven Development, End to end side by side versioning, Feature toggles / Branch by Abstraction

Summary of technologies:

CloudFoundary, MailChimp/Mandrill, Keen.IO, RecSys, TypeScript, Sass/PostCss, TotallyLazy/UtterlyIdle, CouchDB, Rust

November 2015 - June 2016

Continuous Improvement Consultant, BSkyB, London - [abbreviated]

August 2015 - April 2016

Founder, 10second.build, London

I worked on my own startup to try and bring super fast builds to more people for less.

• Taking an idea and trying to turn it into a small business
• Integrating with multiple operational APIs (SSL, DNS, bare metal provisioning, containers/virtualisation)
• Working with bleeding edge technology (the good and the bad!)
• Trying to get the balance between good enough and perfection

Summary of practices used:

Whatever works, grit and determination, elevator pitches

Summary of technologies:

Hyper, Docker, Packet, TotallyLazy, UtterlyIdle, HTTP/JSON

July 2015 - November 2015

Principal Software Engineer, Theorem Technology Ltd, London - [abbreviated]

March 2014 - July 2015

Interim Head of Development, Springer Nature, London

Springer Nature are a scientific publisher with subscription and open access content. I reported to the London Director of IT and and while a new Head of Development was being looked for, I picked up a lot of the role's responsibilities especially around recruitment, personal development, mentoring and feedback sessions.

• Worked across 4 development and 2 DevOps teams in London (~40 people)
• Liaised with multiple global teams (Dordrecht, Berlin and Pune)
• Increased constructive feedback on each development team
• Created a mentorship/buddy program to help junior developers
• Help define the global shared services strategy
• Encourage more developers to get involved in the operational side (DevOps etc)
• Actively encouraged polyglot programming and experimentation with HackDays
• Technical lead for a 5 week prototype to disrupt Springers commercial models

Summary of practices used:

Coaching, Mentorship, Rapid 360 feedback, Feed Forward, Conflict resolution, HackDays, Mindfulness, Retrospectives, Disruptive innovation

July 2013 - February 2014

Senior Software Engineer, Deutsche Bank, London - [abbreviated]

April 2010 - June 2013

Senior Software Engineer, Sky Network Services, London

I was hired to work on the broadband and telephony backend systems powering Sky's ISP backbone. The applications we built provided operational visability into that status of all orders and integrated with multiple internal and 3rd party services.

• Lead team of 8 developers, 2 QA and 1 BA
• Coached developers from imperative programming style to functional programming style
• Guided Sky away from binary coupled RPC systems to decoupled REST services
• Incrementally rewrote 3 critical business systems removing legacy technology
• Massively reduced feedback loop for developer builds ( Article Video )
• Changed Sky Corporate policy to actively encourage Open Source Development

My greatest achievement has been reducing build times from 45 minutes to 3 minutes for one core system

Summary of practices used:

Functional Programming, Agile, TDD, Pair programming, Refactoring, Retrospectives, XP, Continuous Delivery, REST

Summary of technologies:

Totallylazy, UtterlyIdle, Yadic, LazyRecords, Yatspec, Lucene, Java, JParsec, Scala, Mercurial, Subversion, TeamCity, Amazon EC2/S3/CDN, Jetty, SimpleWeb

Sep 2003 - April 2010

Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks Ltd, London

I worked on a large number of projects across a wide range of industries including investment banking, retail banking, broadband provisioning and retail chains. I have mentored a large number developers and also learnt a great deal about design, development, delivery and enablement.

• Technical Lead for both Java and C# Projects
• Strong experience in Investment Banking domain ( Front + Back Office )
• Successfully designed and built a number of analytics engines (Basel 1 + 2)
• Successfully delivered a number of integration services for retail chains

My greatest achievement has been replacing batch processes (6hrs+) with business real time interactive services (10sec)

Summary of pratices used:

Agile, TDD, Pair programming, Ruthless Refactoring, Retrospectives, eXtreme Programming, Continuous Integration, RESTfull services and SOA without the hype

Summary of technologies:

Java, IntelliJ, JUnit, JMock, StringTemplate, Velocity, FreeMarker, PicoContainer, Lucene, Hibernate, Ant, SubVersion, Cvs, C#, VS + Resharper, NUnit, NMock, Nant, CruiseControl.NET, Excel interop, Python, Django

Apr 2006 - Aug 2006

Adventure Motorcyclist, 2 guys, 2 bikes, 22 countries

I was lucky enough to be able to take a 4 month sabbatical from ThoughtWorks, and travel to the border of China and back. We drove through many of the former USSR member states and along one of the most remote roads in the world: the Pamir Highway. As with most travellers, we were amazed by the genuine hospitality of the people we met, often those with the least giving the most.

• Covered 13,000+ miles
• Learnt what it means to push the body to total and utter exhaustion and then sleep like you have never slept before
• And finally learnt that when you are really hungry, you really will eat anything

Pre Jun 2003

[abbreviated]

Education and Qualifications

• Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP) 1.4
• Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) .NET (70-320, 70-316, 70-315, 70-300, 70-229)
• Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) NT4 (70-073, 70-067, 70-068, 70-058, 70-059, 70-087)

• 'A' Levels (Northampton School For Boys) [ Maths, Chemistry and Art ]
• Major Art Scholarship (Lancing College)

Personal Summary

• French - Conversational

References

References on request