About

An experienced engineering leader with a passion for people development, building teams, implementing agile methodologies, and focusing on flow and delivery. A broad history of working with teams using various programming languages, in fast-paced and regulated environments.

Has a track record of increasing team morale and motivation through a holistic people development style, recruitment, and introducing new ways of working. Has also developed strategies, technical roadmaps, architectural reviews, personal development frameworks, addressing technical debt and reducing cycle times significantly.

Holds an HND in Business Information Systems and an HNC in Business IT in Computing from Solent University. Was one of two people in his year to study French and Spanish at GCSE. Consumes an unhealthy amount of football and podcasts, having seen 96 teams play live and (with 231 active podcast subscriptions).

Have a podcast recommendation?

Colophon

Hosted on GitHub Pages, the site uses Jekyll, a static site generator, on Ruby using the liquid templating language. It also uses GitHub Actions and Python for automation and additional compute at build time. Content is written in GitHub flavoured Markdown. Data is stored in Yaml files. DNS and SSL by Cloudflare. VSCode for Mac as the IDE, supported by various plugins. Working Copy on iOS as the Git client of choice. Drafts App as the starting point for content creation.

It is called “weak notes” as a play on words of the popular Government “week notes” blogging style - due to the likelihood, posting will be inconsistent and irregular, and having worked adjacent to Government for 14 years.

The site is a progressive web app (PWA) and can be installed on devices from modern browsers. There is no cookies or tracking other than some of the CloudFlare protection and RUA. The site builds as static html and css, uses browser and Cloudflare caching and scores highly in performance scanning tools and in Lighthouse scores with 100% across the board. At the time of checking the site has valid HTML and valid CSS.

The font-family utilises the user’s operating system setting via the -system-ui declaration, Gill Sans if available, and as a last resort falls back to sans-serif. This means it should look natural and native to the operating system in use. The primary colour scheme is White Smoke as the background, Night for text, Brunswick Green for links, Lapis Lazuli for some additional/secondary text e.g., post meta data and sub headings, and finally Citron is used for accents e.g., borders, separators, quote bars, table header backgrounds, and little bits of whimsy.

In The Press

During an era of running a successful football analytics website I had work published on the Chelsea FC website, FourFourTwo magazine, Man City’s match day programme, the Daily Mail, the Independent and various club fan sites including Crystal Palace, Walsall, Swansea and Man City.

The associated Twitter account, active from 2010 to 2018, peaked at 185,000 followers with a monthly reach of 8 million users worldwide all through organic growth and received acclaim from Opta Sports, Chelsea FC, BBC and other businesses. The account was closed due to Twiiter’s new ownership, whilst noting football statistics had become more mainstream and access to data had become less readily available.

Now

Based on the now page idea from Derek Sivers.

• Surviving - I continue to fight with an undiagnosed fatigue that’s been ongoing since October 2022.
• Reading - I have a huge backlog on my Kindle to get through.
• Gardening - Huge tidy up and tending to the veggie patch and planters.

Next

• Home improvements - A heat pump, new carpets, doors and a new kitchen.
• Cycling - Getting back on Zwift well-being permitting.
• Conferences/Meet-ups - Attending some conferences and meet-ups in the Technology space.