Hey there. I'm a
I'm currently living in London helping Progression build a tech team and find product market fit.
I enjoy helping teams work with intention and agency, and create an environment safe for innovating and building value
What most people in our industry call "process" can be a useful tool to help teams work like teams; but will not replace a shared vision, autonomy and trust. Put great people on a team, give them a clear goal and leave them alone.
The sooner we are honest with ourselves about what how little we know, the sooner we can start working to learn more. There are very few certainties in technology so we must create an environment where it is safe to take calculated risks, build teams that can adapt and introspect and build architecture which is flexible and forgiving.
Celebrating our successes is crucial to building a team that works well together, but so is talking openly and honestly about our failures—and gaining real learnings from them. You can tell a lot about an organisation from the way it talks internally about its successes and failures.
When we create the safety to talk to each other about our failures without retribution or judgement, we do more than learn from our mistakes—we build a genuine human connection with our teammates that is vital in allowing us to work together as one unit. After all, making things open makes things better.
There is a variation on Conway's Law which states "The structure of any system designed by an organization is isomorphic to the structure of the organization", and the strongest indicator of an organisation's true structure is how it spends its money.
"Fix the finances, transform the organisation"—orgs which fund teams end up with a long-lasting ability to build value and respond to change.
Technology has a diversity and inclusion problem which stems from implicit (and often explicit) biases of those in positions of power. It is essentual that we examine our own prejudices, listen, and work against the systemic processes which maintain the inequality we still face.
Diverse teams comprising people from different backgrounds with different experiences who encourage healthy debate work with more empathy and build better technology. Those who don't build their view of the system into their products.
Recent projects and experiments.
A team I worked on played Dobble a lot, which started as fun but ended up being a great way to build connection with each other. When COVID-19 happened, we could no longer play so I built an online version to keep us playing.
Read more about DobbleI was luckily enough to visit Great Animal Orchestra, an immersive art installation. It was a surreal experience and one I tried to recreate as a way of learning about Web Audio APIs.
Read more about Great OrchestraOne of the only things I couldn't do when coding full time on an iPad was use Postman, so I built a command-line client using React and Ink.
Read more about pat-cliI've always thought the Foursquare API is an incredibly accessible, high quality and useful dataset so used it to build a small mobile app using Vue.js and NativeScript to make choosing where to go for lunch a little easier.
Read more about What Next?I set myself the goal of learning piano during COVID-19 lockdown, but it made much more sense to build an app to help myself learn piano rather than actually learning it. Built with SwiftUI.
Read more about Music PracticeMy friend Jamin had noticed that there are some artists that have a passionate following of people who own their pieces. We're building a place to see where in the world that art lives and bring those people together.
In active development