JFDI

Last week I had a really enjoyable conversation with Joe Bignell on his podcast, Joe’s room.

It’s no longer defensible for CEOs and boards to outsource understanding AI to their technology execs.

Earlier this week I was on a panel with some excellent peers discussing AI and engineering productivity.

Have you ever had the experience where you make a great proposal to your Engineering leader and it languishes for weeks and then comes back with a no for reasons that don’t seem to make sense?

Never split the difference is a very interesting book.

In March I gave a talk at CTO Craft Con that bought together a number of topics I’ve been thinking about for the past few years: how to be a great technology leader, being the best you can be at your job, and the true role of a CTO.

An important part of hiring is making reference calls, and this becomes more important the more senior the role you are hiring for.

Here is the video from my panel at the SaaS CTO conference.

When I started a recent role, my exec team peers were working on the three-year strategy using a framework outlined in Playing to Win.

I joined Kooth as Chief Technology Officer just over a year ago.

I was really happy to join Mal Minhas and Chris Evans on a panel at The SaaS CTO conference.

I did an excellent course on Strategy for Directors.

Following on from the great IoD course on finance, I did their Strategy for Directors course.

Last week I joined Luca Rossi on his podcast Refactoring.

I recently joined Pat Kua on his Managing Managers podcast.

A format I have found useful for making proposals is 1-measure-3-1.

A couple of years ago I worked on a strategic project that was outside my remit.

I recently read Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe.

In June 2023, I delivered a talk at Turing Fest on how to create a strategy.

Earlier this year, I keynoted the second day of CTO Craft Con: The Strategic CTO, and the video is now available: You can also read more about the discussion in my write-up.

I keynoted the second day of CTO Craft Con: The Strategic CTO.

I have recently read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

A few weeks ago I joined Neal Ford on his Software Architecture Hour to talk about technical strategy.

Just over three years ago, I wrote about the tech strategy for Customer Products, No next Next.

When working on tech strategy I like to involve as wide a group as possible.

Last year, I read the excellent and very interesting Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks (though in somewhat more than seven weeks).

At the FT we have a role called Principal Engineer.

I delivered a talk at the inaugural London LeadingEng conference on how to set a tech strategy, specifically after the launch.

On Tuesday, I delivered a talk at QCon London: No Next Next: Fighting Entropy in Your Microservices Architecture.

If you want participation in a meeting with people who don’t spend a lot of time together, one thing that can help is getting everyone to say something at the start; here is a low-pressure way to do that.

Yesterday, I delivered a talk at LeadDev Together: The good, the bad and the tech strategy.

I recently couldn’t work out why Clojure was not working concurrently in a Vagrant box.

Two years ago, I wrote about how as a technical leadership team we can figure out what to work on.

Threat modelling is a way to identify the potential security flaws in your system, and prioritise mitigations.

We wanted good WiFi coverage in our house and we did not have it, so we set up a Ubiquiti network.

This is the third of three posts summarising some very interesting things I learned about finance on a recent IoD course.

On Monday I published part one of three blog posts about finance, finishing with a quiz.

A couple of years ago I got some excellent training on finance from a finance director at the FT.

Last month I facilitated a panel at Lead Dev Live about how to build an effective tech strategy.

I recently went on an inclusive leadership course at work.

Last week I gave a keynote at CTO Craft conference based on my blog post about moving to durable teams.

Prompted by some discussions at work, I recently read Turn the Ship Around!

Even if we don’t work in sales, we often need to sell something: an idea, a course of action, or ourselves (e.g. in a job interview).

When I joined the Financial Times as Technical Director for FT.com, I inherited a team of around 50 engineers.

On Monday I was on a panel, organised by Codemotion, about technical leadership.

Over the past six months, my group at the Financial Times has moved from project-based teams to durable teams.

We are coming up to mid-year review time in my group at the FT, and two brilliant engineers on my team, Glynn Phillips and Charlotte Payne, decided to run a session for the other line managers in our group on why we have this process.

I recently found myself having to use mod_wsgi, an Apache module which can host Python web apps that support the WSGI spec.

I was meant to go to Nottingham this week to give a talk about tech strategy.

With our whole team suddenly working from home, we’ve put in a regular Friday 3pm “remote social” for the whole of Customer Products, a team of about 60 people.