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

John Redhead Creative

Created user flows, wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes using Figma and ProtoPie, for MVP apps for an RFID hygiene app and a customer engagement platform.

Created pitch, investor and sales decks for several start-ups for funding, as well as marketing materials and exhibition graphics.

Designed booklets & brochures for a school training company, as well as maintaining their website.
Developed user interfaces for a system to identify and track how the youngest children are progressing and evidence their journey through their Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS).

Created designs for an online Self-evaluation tool that supports schools in shaping their School Improvement Plans in preparation for OFSTED inspections.

Digital Product Designer & full stack Software Developer

Digitalquill Ltd

Built several complex wireframes and advanced interactive designs using ProtoPie for gas cylinder tracking using RFID; for new cylinders coming into a gas plant, to their repair and distribution. In many countries, bottled gas is their only option for gas, so the development included designing user interfaces for users to order a new full cylinder or report them stolen. 

Developed and implemented designs for a food menu app, including customer ordering front-end, kitchen and front-of-house EPOS. Collaborated with the product manager to prioritise and implement improvements from user feedback.

Collaborated with cross-functional teams to define, design and implement a table booking app.

Designed user interfaces for apps Mental Health, Smoke Alarm Testing and Customer Relationship Management apps.

Graphic/User Interface Designer Front-End Developer

Educater

Designed and launched a school pupil assessment and progress tracking tool for Sheffield Council, which served around 140 schools.

Developed user interfaces to create interactive versions of Local Authorities Education Healthcare Plans, helping to reduce the administrative burden of managing the SEND process. Various sections of the plan were sent to parents and other healthcare practitioners, which would then be collated once completed and returned.

Designed a school pupil reporting system, that allowed teachers to complete reports for parents about the child, which were then verified by senior management before being sent on to parents.

Developed user interface for a ‘Pupil Passport’, which allowed SEN children to complete a ‘one-page’ passport about their goals and aspirations, what they like and don’t like, what their individual needs are and what the best way is to support them.

Designed and implemented a ‘Parent Passport’ app that parents could use to keep in touch with their child’s school, along with viewing their child’s progress.

Created all the marketing materials and exhibition stands used in the business.

Collaborated with trainers to design and maintain training templates and materials.

Created and implemented a style guide to increase design consistency across the business.

-------------
Designed to dramatically reduce the administration burden within several key areas, including school tracking & assessment and SEND paperwork, Educater was launched at BETT 2015 and was one of only 30 companies selected to be showcased in the Bett Futures area of the show by a panel of teachers and education experts, due to the strength of its new solution.

CreativeDirector

PIXELfusion

Designed the user interfaces and front-end development of a ticketing system for a rugby club.

Developed an interactive templating system for a company selling print-on-demand marketing mailouts for optometrists.

Director/ Graphic/UI Designer & Front-End Developer

POPex Limited

I worked on several long-term, large-scale website development projects, including a website for the Official English Women’s Rugby Football Union and a vertical Internet Directory for the Point-of-Purchase Industry.

Engineered Point-of-Purchase displays and designed exhibition stands.

Developed and maintained websites for several customers including eight publishing websites using the same codebase and database for Business Review Ltd. One of these won a WebAward for ‘Outstanding Achievement for Web Site Development’. Some projects have also been featured in industry magazines.

Website Designer & Software Developer

BallisticBlue

Created an e-commerce store on an open-source .net solution and developed a front-end editor to personalise invitations for print.

Developed pages for split A/B testing for conversion rate optimisation.

Web Developer/Programmer & Graphic Designer

Garthwest Display

My responsibilities included engineering corrugated and permanent Point-of-Purchase displays, ordering cutter-formes, liaising with sales personnel and visiting clients.

Achievements included winning a Silver POPAI (Point of Purchase Advertising International) award in 1995 for a Disney Hercules Video Display.

My other responsibilities included generating artwork for our print department, maintaining the computer network and other IT-related activities.

Design Manager

As an award-winning full-stack developer, graphic designer and digital product designer I bring a blend of skills to the table. My passion lies in crafting exceptional user experiences and delivering compelling, innovative, creative solutions that resonate with customers.

Why do I do what I do? Simple—I love sparking enthusiasm and fostering engagement among users, refining and optimising the user experience to drive tangible results for clients. I’m eager to contribute these skills to a team that values innovation and creativity.

My diverse experience spans Technology Research, Publishing, Education Software, Packaging, RFID solutions, E-commerce and Quality Assurance. I’ve designed captivating point-of-sale and point-of-purchase materials for a wide range of brands, enhancing the in-store customer experience.

I am a qualified 3-Dimensional designer using archaic pencils and pens, but am at ease wielding a mouse or Wacom pen as well.

I’ve also been involved in Quality Assurance testing, having been a Tier 1 Beta tester for the CorelDraw Graphics Suite from version 9 through to version 12, becoming one of their most prolific bug hunters.

taplio

The Battle

Richard Donovan

John Redhead

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?