After three years coaching engineers and leaders on mindset and wellbeing, I’m now combining that experience with my deep software engineering background as a Software Engineering Manager at OVO Energy.

Our work empowers customers to transition to greener energy by guiding them through the process of selecting and installing EV chargers. With ChargeAnytime, they benefit from cheaper, smarter charging, and through partnerships with industry leaders like Volvo and VWG, we extend this even further—offering new EV owners thousands of free miles alongside ongoing cost savings on their EV charging.

I work closely with my head of engineering to help shape our engineering strategy and model architecture. Through continuous improvement and a strong engineering culture, we continue to move toward our vision.

I’ve grown my fully remote team from four to ten engineers. This involved hiring and onboarding top talent and ensuring the right balance of technical expertise, mindset, and collaboration. 

I employ strategies such as dysfunction mapping to highlight areas for improvement within my teams. We also hold weekly continuous improvement sessions to provide feedback, engage team members, and track progress toward our technical and behavioural goals.

I focus on a coaching approach for my engineers, encourage taking responsibility and insist on fostering a psychologically safe environment were we can give and receive feedback, talk about mistakes and learn from them without the blame and judgement.

I work closely with nearshore partners, seamlessly integrating them into our work processes to extend our capabilities.

I recently represented OVO at Volvo’s Stockholm HQ, taking part in a two-day kickoff workshop for a multi-business collaboration project.

Contributed to ISO acreditation process for ChargeAnytime.

Software Engineering Manager

RD Coached Ltd

As the director of RD Coached Ltd, I provide mindset workshops and talks to software development teams and I provide 1-2-1 coaching to software developers and software development leaders.

Delivered a 2-hour workshop and delivered a talk on the main track at the C3 Dev Festival 2024 held in Amsterdam and the TechLead Conference 2024.

I also provide software development consultancy services via outside IR35 Contracts.

As part of my role, I continue to build automation systems to streamline my business, including integrating Notion and LinkedIn to save time scheduling and posting social media content.

I've also built a wellbeing hub for software developers and leaders with tools to help with mental and physical wellbeing. One of my tools integrates with the OpenAI Api.

Key technical skills:
C# Net 7, .Net Core, EF, ASP.NET, MVC, WebAPI, Microservices, HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns, Azure DevOps, Azure Services, Docker, SCRUM, Agile, Apps Script, SQL Server, coaching, training, speaking

Director

Mindspan

As a Peak Performance Mindset Coach, I delivered Talks, Workshops and 1-2-1 coaching based on Mindspan's Peak Performance Mind Programme.

Peak Performance Mindeset Coach

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) 

During my time with BEIS, I wrote a support application in React to streamline queries from the Government's Help To Grow programme, often reducing the effort from hours to minutes.

I saved the department nearly £20k by reviewing their caching strategy of the main Help to Grow system and providing feedback.

I later moved to the initial stages of the government's Energy Support scheme, in which I communicated with cross-functional teams to solidify the team's understanding of requirements as well as guided those less technical teams on the art of the possible, given the requirements and the time pressures we were under.

I onboarded and mentored new team members and took an active role in ensuring everyone had a voice in our meetings.

Senior Software Engineer

Aviva

Technical:
As part of a small team of software architects, I was responsible for overseeing the work of up to 200 developers who delivered our suite of digital online applications globally. 

I introduced consistent patterns and practices to ensure efficient and consistent development across our teams. 

I defined and implemented coding standards, peer reviews and integrated new technologies into the ecosystem.

Key projects include:
Migration to .NET Core and a containerized, cloud-based architecture.

Migration of our source control and build system from Atlassian Stash and Jenkins to Microsoft Azure DevOps, introducing comprehensive CI/CD processes

Developed and maintained a microservice-based API layer using .Net Core 3.1/Net 5.

Full re-write of a legacy payment application into .NET Core 3.1.

Key Skills:
C# Net 5, .Net Core, ASP.NET, MVC, HTML, CSS, Accessibility, Javascript, JQuery, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns, Azure DevOps, Docker, SCRUM, Agile

Thoughts:
I recognised the struggles I'd had during my career, in the developers I worked with, and started to think in terms of positively impacting those around me.

I realised that mindset and mental health were being overlooked, and companies didn't seem to be aware of the specific challenges developers face on a daily basis. 

I wanted to change this. It started with the impact that technical decisions could have and later moved into a focus on mindset, wellbeing and engineering excellence.

Software Architect

Technical:
Many developers and BAs were just starting an agile transformation and struggled to grasp the benefits. 

By building trust and showing rather than telling, I brought them along on our agile journey.

A big turning point was gaining the trust of the Product Owner, who had been very sceptical under the previous leadership. 

The team was growing fast, which meant I had to improve at delegating and trusting my team, too.

With so many engineering teams across the organisation, communication was a struggle. 

To improve the situation, I arranged a bi-weekly meeting for team leads to discuss upcoming work and share technical best practices or concerns.

The result was improved communication and collaboration across teams, better reuse of code and designs, a more consistent code base, and improved knowledge sharing.

Key skills
C#, ASP.NET MVC, JQuery, HTML, CSS, Accessibility, SQL Server 2012, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns, TDD, Moq, LINQ, Structure Map, BDD, Selenium, SCRUM, Agile, Javascript, Knockout, CSS

Thoughts:
Having recently been made redundant, I struggled with my self-belief and confidence when I started this role. I felt like I bundled my way through the interview, and when I actually started my role, I had massive feelings of imposter syndrome. 

I doubled down on areas of mindset and mental health to improve self-belief and confidence. Very quickly I was leading by example and driving the team to the successful completion of two major projects.

Team Lead

BGO Studios

Technical:
As a Senior Software Engineer at BGO Studios, I was the lead server developer on the Remote Gaming Server (RGS) project.  

The team: 3 server-side developers, 2 mathematicians and 4 front end developers based in London. 

My responsibilities:
• Design and implement the Remote Gaming Server roadmap
• Report project status to senior management 
• Distribution of development tasks 
• Interpret complex math models and create server-side implementation
• Integrate with an admin system to view spin data
• Create simulation programs to spin the slot machine up to 500 million times to generate statistics 
• Liaise with internal and external QA teams
• Expose a REST API to be consumed by Flash/HTML5 client
• Consume REST services of gambling platform to provide user account and wallet facilities.

Games released to live::
•	Jurassic Island 
•	Jungle Trouble 
•	Satsumos Revenge 
•	Murder Mystery 
•	Aladdin and The Wild Genie
•	Jekyll & Hyde 

* Slots engine was subsequently sold.

Key skills
HTML, CSS, C#, ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server 2014, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns, DDD, SOA, WCF Services (REST/Soap), Test Driven Development, Rhino Mocks, LINQ, Structure Map

Thoughts:
In this role, I was once again tested from a mental strength and mindset perspective. It was both very stressful and extremely technical. I key part of dealing with the pressure and stress of this role was prioritising my physical health and really leaning on my mindset.

This helped me massively in dealing with what started out as some quite challenging relationships. I gained a great appreciation for the importance of relationships in work and also in my personal life.

Proteo

Technical:
I was responsible for delivering the product road map, defining product architecture and the functional design of new product capabilities. 

I produced technical specifications, development estimates and participated in implementation, overseeing the work of the team. 

Key skills included object-oriented design, asynchronous programming, design patterns and database design. 

I also got involved in pre-sales by providing product demonstrations to potential new clients.

Key skills
C#, ASP.NET Webforms/MVC, JQuery, SQL Server 2012, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns, SOA, WCF Services (REST/Soap), Entity Framework, LINQ, Bing Maps/Virtual Earth, Active Reports.NET, Telerik controls and reporting, Silverlight, MVVM, JavaScript

Thoughts:
I was the  Team Lead/Architect of the Proteo product development team. 

This was the first time I had led a team and I really started to see the importance of patience, support and the massive significance of mindset and mental health. 

This was both from my own perspective and from the perspective of my team members too. 

Leaning on my mentors, I started to develop my leadership style but more importantly, I started to develop my self-belief, confidence and communication skills.

Team Lead / Architect

Tournament.com

Technical:
Tournament.com was an online gaming site where customers paid to compete and potentially win money based on their performance in the game. 

As a software engineer, I was responsible for the full development life cycle of the Tournament.com client, a downloadable windows forms application. The purpose of the application was to register and launch third party games. It also provided a wealth of information to customers about services available including promotions, offers and tournaments. It allowed users to chat and join scheduled tournaments for their chosen game.  My key responsibilities were:

Producing technical specifications for the Tournament.com client.
Designing and implementing a multi-threaded application.
Usage of design patterns.
Usage of object oriented design to streamline the application code and ensure that it was concise and maintainable.
Release management.

Key skills 
C#, Winforms, ASP.NET, SQL Server, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns, Multi-threading

Thoughts:
This role turned out to be a technically challenging and high pressure job. I learnt a lot about how not to achieve work/life balance. Luckily, the work was really interesting and the people were good fun.

Software Engineer

Homeserve

Reward Scheme project

Key skills 
VB.NET, Winforms, ASP.NET, SQL Server, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns

The aim of this project was to motivate engineers to reduce remedial call outs by awarding\deducting points which translated into a regular bonus. This saved the company significant costs and increased productivity in 75% of the depots up and down the country. Key aspects of my role were:

Object orientated programming, n-tier architecture.
Adhering to strict coding standards, participating in peer code reviews.
Transformation of functional requirement documents into technical specifications and designs.
Accurate time keeping as all time was logged to monitor costs of different projects.
Communicating effectively with depot users, other developers and senior management.
To provide regular statistical analysis of the performance of all aspects of the job tracking system.

IT Systems Developer

💚 Helping Developers & Leaders Balance Wellbeing and Success 🚀 | Software Developer | Leader | Mindset Coach | Personal Trainer | Mental Health First Aider

With over 24 years of software engineering experience and 3 years spent coaching software engineers and software engineering leaders on their mindset and wellbeing, I'm currently combining this skill set as a Software Engineering Manager.

I aim to positively impact the Software Engineering industry by highlighting the importance of mindset, mental health and wellbeing within high-performing teams.

My ambition is to run the software engineering function for a huge company so that I can shape the culture and ways of working on a large scale and hopefully gain wider traction across the industry.

I've spoken at an international tech conference about the importance of mindset, wellbeing and mental health in the software engineering industry.

In my teams:

I value great communication, collaboration and empathy.

A growth mindset, a positive attitude, and a thirst for continuous improvement are key qualities I look for.

Taking responsibility for our thoughts as well as our actions is extremely important.

I encourage my team to prioritise their wellbeing and their physical and mental health.

We focus on what we CAN do, not what we can't...

We focus on small individual habits...

And small team-level habits...

That compound over time...

The direction of travel is the most important thing. 
Always improving, even by the smallest amount. 
The speed at which we improve can vary massively, but we consistently move in the right direction.

Richard Donovan

Trivial Business

Providing interim software engineering management (VP Engineering/CTO) for startups and SMEs.
Providing leadership and software development coaching and mentoring to software engineering leaders and their teams.

Example projects:

■ Interim CTO redefining the IT infrastructure and software systems of a business turnaround.
■ Interim CTO of an angel backed start-up.
■ Leading the development of a large scale website for the BBC.
■ Advising on technology strategy for businesses.
■ Advising a consultancy on technology deliver and project turnaround.
■ Advising a technology company on the use of machine learning and NLP to access sentiment on financial news.

Providing training, mentoring and coaching to Staff+ and Engineering Managers on leadership and soft skills.

Providing training, mentoring and coaching software engineers. Delivering the training both on-site and remote. Topics included: Go, Python, C++, NLP and Machine Learning.

Chief Technology Officer

Coding Chats

Podcast Host

Coding Challenges

Writing weekly coding challenges that help software engineers level up by building real-world software applications.

Delivering live software engineering training.

Software Engineering Coach

Acast

Acast is a podcast advertising company. They help creators and advertisers connect.

AWS, CDK, Typescript/JavaScript and node.js

Senior Software Engineering Manager

Met Office

The Met Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service, providing critical weather services and world-leading climate science, helping you make better decisions to stay safe and thrive.

AWS (Cloud) and Python for handling large meteorological data sets.

Contract Software Engineer

Sky is Europe's largest media company and pay-TV broadcaster.

Building serverless solutions to support Sky’s broadcasting activities using Python 3.8, Java, AWS and the Serverless Framework.

Cirrus Logic

Cirrus Logic is a fabless semiconductor supplier that specialises in analog, mixed-signal, and audio DSP integrated circuits.

Managing several teams developing Data Engineering Tools to gather, process and distribute data to support the development, testing and deployment of machine learning algorithms using Python, Conda, PyTest, Numpy, Pandas, Dask and Dask-Distributed.

Starting to build a new team whilst designing, developing and deploying software tools to manage big data for the development and evaluation of biometric algorithms.

Principal Software Architect

Software development for High Performance Computing using Python, SciPy, Pandas, NumPy, Dask, Dask-Distributed and C.

Principal Software Engineer

Morningstar

Morningstar Real-Time Data provides real-time. low latency financial market data feeds.

Leading a globally distributed team of 40+ software engineering and QA staff developing and supporting real time low latency market data feed handlers and supporting infrastructure for several hundred financial exchanges. 
Using C++, C# and Python on Windows.

Head of Software Engineering

Aria Networks

Aria Networks provides artificial intelligence driven network planning and optimisations tools for major telecommunications companies, over-the-top providers and global enterprises.

■ Defining the technical strategy to deliver the business strategy and products.
■ Leading the software development and QA teams delivering a customised network capacity planning and optimisation tool for telecommunications networks (IP, MPLS, OTN, SDN and NFV).
■ Using C++, Boost, QT, JavaScript and Python to build software based around an Artificial Intelligence (AI, specifically Evolutionary Computing/Genetic Algorithms & Neural Networks) 
engine that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

VP Engineering

Helping you become a better software engineer through coding challenges that build real applications.

I am on a mission to level up one million software engineers and software engineering leaders!

I’m doing that by: 

1. Helping you improve your coding skills through Coding Challenges that have you building real applications.

2. Helping you improve your software development and soft skills with posts and articles about software development.

You can find the coding challenges here ➡ https://codingchallenges.fyi

You can follow me here on LinkedIn for the posts and articles!

I also post some longer articles on my Developing Skills newsletter here ➡  https://developingskills.substack.com/


My BACKGROUND:

I'm a software engineer and sometimes a manager of software engineers. I've worked as both a senior individual contributor (Staff+) and a senior manager (VP Engineering, Head of Software Development).

I've worked across many tech stacks. I've spent most of the last six years building distributed systems with Python and Flask deployed on AWS using CloudFormation and some CDK. 

Recently there has been some TypeScript/JavaScript, React and Next.js on the frontend with Node.js and Express on the backend. Deployed on AWS using CDK.

For most of my career before that I worked in C++. I'm coming the full circle now and currently learning Rust.

I have a passion to help individuals, teams and departments reach their full potential.

John Crickett

I don’t mind if you let an LLM write all your code, as long as you understand all your code.

Treat it the same way you’d treat a teammate’s pull request. Read it. Question it. Make sure it fits your team’s standards and can be understood by the people who will maintain it.

If it’s good, ship it. If it’s not, refine it or rewrite it. Simple.

AI should accelerate you, not replace your judgement. The quality of your work still depends on how well you can read, reason about, and explain the code you ship.

The rule stays the same: you own what goes to production, no matter who typed it.

CTO / VP Engineering / Head of Software Engineering

Here's my problem with people claiming they use AI to write 13,000 lines of production code per day and who suggest it is a repeatable process.

I can't write a clear enough specification for enough functionality to fill 13,000 lines of code per day, every single day.

And I've never met anyone else who can either.

The bottleneck isn't writing code, it's knowing what code to write.

Let's discuss how we tackle that bottleneck, with or without AI.

19 books on Software Architecture - that you can get for around 4% of the cover price right now!

👉 Modern Software Engineering
👉 Understanding Software Dynamics
👉 Software Requirements Essentials
👉 Righting Software
👉 Balancing Coupling in Software Design
👉 Architecture for Flow
👉 Effective Software Architecture
👉 Software Architecture and Decision-Making
👉 Domain Driven Design Distilled
👉 Functional and Concurrent Programming
👉 Software Architecture in Practice
👉 Practical Object-Oriented Design
👉 Serverless as a Game Changer
👉 The Async-First Playbook
👉 Principles of Web API Design
👉 Strategic Monoliths and Microservices
👉 Domain Storytelling
👉 Continuous Architecture in Practice
👉 Patterns for API Design

You get all of these worth over £618 for around £25 right now through Humble’s Book Bundle and support charity, details here: https://lnkd.in/en2eN_kG

Unskilled and inexperienced software engineers take simple requirements and create complex code.

Skilled and experienced software engineers take complex requirements and create simple code.

The difference is that experience maintaining a complex system, teaches them the benefits of simple code and gives them the skills to do so.

This is also why skilled, experienced software engineers are best positioned to leverage AI-assisted software engineering: they know how to turn a complex set of high level requirements into a simple set of low-level requirements that can be used to prompt and AI-agent and have it build simple code.

Tips for AI-Assisted software development:

If you don’t get it, don’t ship it.

AI can write code fast, but it can’t think about the future. Pasting code you don’t fully understand leads to tech debt, surprises, and skills that get rusty. 

Understanding the code keeps your skills sharp and your product reliable.

Read every bit of code before it hits your repo. If you can’t explain it, rewrite it or prompt the AI to try again.

Want to write better software?

Then embrace the Unix Philosophy as described in The Art of Unix Programming. It provides 17 great rules for writing better software.

With AI-assisted software development rules 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 15 are even more important and using AI to generate code satisfies rule 14!

The rules are:

1. Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.
2. Rule of Clarity: Clarity is better than cleverness.
3. Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected to other programs.
4. Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines.
5. Rule of Simplicity: Design for simplicity; add complexity only where you must.
6. Rule of Parsimony: Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.
7. Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and debugging easier.
8. Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and simplicity.
9. Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data so program logic can be stupid and robust.
10. Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.
11. Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.
12. Rule of Repair: When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.
13. Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.
14. Rule of Generation: Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can.
15. Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.
16. Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for “one true way”.
17. Rule of Extensibility: Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.

Embrace the UNIX Philosophy

Tips for AI-assisted software development:

Boring tech gives AI superpowers.

AI coding agents performs best with tools, languages, and frameworks that have been around long enough to show up consistently in its training data. 

When you push it onto the bleeding edge, it starts hallucinating, and the quality drops. You’ll see odd patterns, missing steps, or advice that just doesn’t hold up.

To get the best results, pick a well-established framework or language. Pick 'boring' tech! Ten tell the AI exactly what you’re using.

Tips for AI-Assisted software development:

Don't ask AI to build the house, ask it to make the bricks.

People struggle with AI coding tools because they're asking for too much at once. They want entire features, complete apps, full systems. The AI generates something massive, half of it doesn't work, and now you're debugging spaghetti code you didn't write.

Flip the approach. Ask AI to generate small, well-defined components. A single function. A reusable component. One API endpoint. You architect how they fit together.

Think LEGO, not construction. AI is incredible at fabricating pieces to spec. 

You're still the one building something meaningful from them.

29 great books on AI Algorithms and LLMs - that you can get for around 3% of the cover price right now!

This looks like a great deal, in particular I recommend Emmanuel Maggiori’s book: The AI Pocket Book. I'm looking forward to reading several others!

👉 Build A Large Language Model
👉 AI Agents In Action
👉 Grokking Artificial Intelligence Algorithms
👉 AI-Powered Search
👉 Generative AI In Action
👉 AI For Everyday IT
👉 Causal AI
👉 The Art of AI Product Development
👉 Starting Data Analytics with Generative AI and Python
👉 Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming
👉 AI as a Service
👉 Interpretable AI
👉 Software Testing with Generative AI
👉 Learn Generative AI With PyTorch
👉 Time Series Forecasting Using Foundation Models
👉 Effective Conversational AI
👉 How Large Language Models Work
👉 Succeeding With AI
👉 Introduction to Generative AI
👉 AI-Powered Developer
👉 Inside AI
👉 Build Financial Software With Generative AI
👉 Data Storytelling With Altair and AI
👉 Coding With AI
👉 Prompt Engineering For AI Systems
👉 Zero To AI
👉 The Complete Obsolete Guide to Generative AI
👉 The AI Pocket Book
👉 Regular Expression Puzzled and AI Coding Assistants

You get all of these worth over £1155 for around £35 right now through Humble’s Book Bundle and support charity, details here: https://lnkd.in/eAwEJAiu

What if that unrealistic estimate isn't wrong? What if you just don't know why it might be right?

Your manager says hours. You're thinking days. They must be stupid or unreasonable, right?

Maybe. Or maybe they know something you don't. A tool. A technique. Some context that changes everything.

You won't find out by complaining. You will find out by being curious. Ask them: "How do you see this getting done in that time?"

Two things happen. Either you learn something that makes you faster, or they realise they missed something and you have a real conversation about time or scope.

Either way, you win.

taplio

The Battle

Richard Donovan

John Crickett

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