About thechelsuk

* This website is named “weak notes” as a play on words of the popular Government Digital Service era week notes blogging style about working in the open by default- due to the likelihood, posting will be inconsistent, irregular, and having worked adjacent to, but not in, Government for 14 years.

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, having seen 96 teams play live, as well as podcasts, with 220 active subscriptions.

Have a podcast recommendation?

Currently on long term sick leave, read more about disabilities and how they affect me here.

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.

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. There is minimal JavaScript used on the site purely for the Service Worker for caching and offline support. The site also utilises a web App Manifest for Progressive Web App (PWA) support.

The font-family is a custom font, secondary to that the site 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 should the primary font not work. 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. Tables are Gray Cloud with Snow for the alternate rows, and code blocks have a background of fffafa.

There are further variations for sunset, night, sunrise, with the default theme being day, however, the site also supports preferred-colour-scheme so on initial visit it’ll match your device mode. The site also sets a variable in local browser storage to remember theme selection*. Please note it’s a challenge for the visitor to find the theme toggles.

The site uses some icons to denote the type of content these should be self explanatory but ultimately these are all just decorative and non-functional; Additional ⇉ (⇉) is used for sponsored content and adverts. Certain content is presented in blocks that have a left border and an icon. [] denotes code, > for quotes, and ⓘ for callouts.

In The Press

During an era of running a successful and pioneering 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 organisations. The account was ranked 4th most influential Chelsea twitter account by HITC in 2013. The account was closed due to Twiiter’s ownership change, whilst it is also worth noting football statistics had become more mainstream and access to data had become less readily available given it’s commerical importance to data businesses and it’s adoption by clubs targeting performance gains such that the effort and maintenance outweighed the enjoyment. A new .uk domain was created and the previous .co.uk allowed to expire as content pivoted to a personal indie weblog.