38 Degrees

38 Degrees was the UK's largest political campaigning organisation, with over 2 million active members when I was there. They sent over a million emails a day encouraging those members to take action on a wide range of political issues - from saving local libraries and protecting bees, to investigating dodgy government contracts and avoiding a no-deal Brexit.

In 2016 they hired me to build and lead their first in-house tech team, as they shifted from SaaS to in-house campaigning platforms, to enable rapid testing of new digital tactics.

When I left in 2021, the tech team was 8 people split across London and Edinburgh (shifting comfortably to fully-remote early in 2020), and some of the tools we had built were being used by, and collaboratively maintained with, similar campaigning organisations in a dozen other countries all around the world.

My role included software and systems design and development, technical leadership and team leadership, mentoring and line management, and recruitment (and retention) with a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. My favourite parts of this role were mentoring less experienced developers, and consciously working to establish and maintain a team culture of trust and mutual support.

More broadly, I helped campaigners dream up new and exciting tools that members could use to “defend fairness, protect rights, promote peace, preserve the planet, and deepen democracy” - which was every bit as challenging and rewarding as it sounds.

Key technologies: Ruby (Rails, Padrino), Postgres, AWS (RDS, Redshift, SES, S3), Heroku, HireFire, Mailjet, Cloudflare, DMARC, SPF.

Lead Software Engineer

Shiny Ideas

As a partnership, Shiny Ideas offered high quality web design and custom web application development.  I also provided contract software development services through this company.

Technologies: Perl (Catalyst, Moose, CPAN), MySQL (DBIx::Class), Apache (fastcgi), Linux (CentOS, cPanel).

Technical Director

Jobsite

Six month contract building an API layer which consumes several existing APIs and outputs the collated data in a new unified format, to power Jobsite's next mobile app.

Senior Perl Developer

Daisy Group

Twelve month contract building libraries and web interfaces for a wholesale broadband provisioning system, interfacing with various third-party APIs.

Web Application Developer

King's College London

Two week contract writing a set of scripts to consolidate logging data from 100+ websites on 60+ servers into a central database, to enable client organisation to prepare data-driven reports on their activities.

Software Engineer

123-reg.co.uk

Four month contract building a new control panel for 123-reg customers.

Web Developer

Encompass Digital Media, Inc.

Short-term contract automating various workflows involved in taking live TV broadcasts and preparing them for rebroadcast on a video on demand platform.

Perl Developer

PhotoBox

Three week contract rebuilding an old web application to meet the requirements of a new business model.

Consulting on various Perl issues on a part-time basis (3 days per week).  Major tasks including building a system to run incoming and archived digital media files through language identification software and report on results in various ways including automated warning emails, enabling the business to meet their very strict SLA conditions in this area with greater confidence.

Bauer Media

Four week contract writing code to collect, process and save data from a third-party API for display on one of Bauer's websites.

I like making things - so I am happiest when I am doing hands-on technical work, and the architectural thinking required to do it well.

I want to be proud of the things I make - so I want to prioritise 'doing things well' over 'doing things fast', whenever possible.

I value honesty, autonomy, and collaboration.

I have been designing and building web applications and related systems professionally since 1998, mostly with Ruby and Rails since 2016.

I have contributed to dozens of open source projects, and started a few of my own; my main project is ShinyCMS, which is available in both Perl and Ruby versions. I have a first class honours degree in Computing, but being part of the open source community has taught me more and richer lessons.

From 2016 to 2021 I built and led the first in-house technical team at 38 Degrees - a digital-first political campaigning organisation with over 2 million active members across the UK.

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