JFDI

I’ve written briefly about Slack before (at the end of my post on High Output Management), but this year I decided to re-read it.

This year, I finally read The Effective Executive.

Triggers is a very interesting book.

Earlier this year, I read What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

Last week, I wrote about how we worked out our tech strategy for FT.com.

When you are launching a new product to replace an existing one, it’s easy to rally behind the mission and make the right technical decisions that will get you over the line.

After you launch a new product and no longer have the launch to work towards, it’s very easy for things to drift off track.

Last year, I met the excellent Russell Davies to ask his advice on how to create a strategy.

I’m the Technical Director of Customer Products at the Financial Times.

A while ago, the excellent Russell Davies gave me a copy of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.

This is the first role I’ve had managing a large budget and I recently had some excellent training from my finance director colleague Isabelle Campbell.

Building relationships with vendors is an important part of my role as Tech Director and when I joined the Financial Times, the excellent Rob Shilston gave me his five top top tips on how to make the most of those meetings.

Last April, I joined the Financial Times as Technical Director for FT.com.

When I joined the Government Digital Service in April 2012, GOV.UK was just going into public beta.

Interviews are not a great way to find out how good someone will actually be at the job.

Earlier this year I read High Output Management.

I had long been thinking I must move the SPA site to HTTPS.

As part of my ongoing mission to update the SPA conference website, I had long wanted to replace the CMS.

When leaving my last job I decided to do an exercise which compares what other people think my strengths are with what I think my strengths are.

I think GDPR is great.

A few weeks ago I talked about how coding in the open can help you release faster at PipelineConf.

The SPA conference website deploys to production automatically on merge to master.

One of my main aims as Open Source Lead at the Government Digital Service was to make sure that there were good resources in place to help people code in the open.

Every digital service designed within government has to meet the Digital Service Standard.

I have been the Open Source Lead at GDS for a year now.

In August I gave a talk about coding in the open in government at Turing Fest.

I usually publicise new posts on Twitter, though I also have an Atom feed.

There’s a task I have to do every now and again for which awk is the best tool, but it’s infrequent enough that I always have to remind myself how.

I run the website for SPA conference.

I run the website for SPA conference.

There are two big concerns government organisations have around making source code open.

For any service to be put in front of the public, it has to meet the Digital Service Standard, a set of 18 criteria.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to work with my excellent colleagues Rosa Fox and Lucy Carey on a series of workshops to help get more underrepresented people in tech into public speaking.

We are hosting the second cross-government meetup on Open Source in London on Tuesday 26th September.

I help run SPA, a workshop-based conference on all aspects of advancements in software development – technology, processes, people and practice – and we are looking for people to join the organising committee for the 2018 conference.

As I become more senior I have more of a need to write business cases.

We are organising a series of cross-government Open Source meetups to exchange ideas, talk about code we can reuse or collaborate on and build a community around Open Source.

I was recently appointed Open Source Lead at the Government Digital Service (GDS) with the aim of making more government code open, improving the reusability of the open code we already have, and helping government as a whole be a better member of the Open

I’m pleased to announce that I’m now Open Source Lead at GDS.

Someone recently asked my advice on blogging, particularly how I decide what to write about and whether I set aside specific time.

I’ve had this blog for five years, but I’ve only recently started using my phone to browse the internet, at which point I realised it displayed terribly on a small screen.

When I started line managing people at work, three years ago, I got some great advice from the excellent Andrew Seward.

At Scale Summit last week I led a session on code-sharing in large organisations.

We previously wrote about looking into offering a platform to host digital services.

Video from my FFconf talk Operations: a developer’s guide.

Slides from my talk Operations: a developer’s guide, at FFConf 2015.

I gave a keynote at Velocity EU about the work I’ve been doing on a PaaS for government.

I’ve been working on a prototype of what a Platform as a Service (PaaS) for government might look like, as we wrote about in a previous post.

Right now, hosting services is one of the most time-consuming barriers for new digital services, and usually involves duplicating work done elsewhere.

Until recently, career development for technologists at GDS was relatively unstructured, and dependent on what opportunities came up.