A bit about me
I am a labrador owning dad and product guy with a passion for the web and tech. Since creating my first website in 1994, I have spent the intervening years helping companies both big and small with their web based products.
A day in the life of...
I currently live in Stamford in the UK, a picturesque and vibrant town with an abnormally large number of restaurants and cafes – I should know, I’m a frequent visitor to lots of them! I became a dad in 2018 which has been a very distressing event for my black lab, Molly, who no longer gets the amount of attention she used to!
When not out and about I'm a huge music fan and seriously wonder how on Earth I survived before Spotify came along; oh hang on, I remember, I used to have 1000s of CDs! I also appreciate a good movie or TV show, especially in the winter months, meaning I'm a heavy Netflix/Prime user.
Whilst not being the most sporty, I do enjoy watching several sports including rugby (I'm Welsh so that probably goes without saying), cycling and biathlon. When winter comes around though, I start to stare longingly towards The Alps. I’m a big skier and I try to go at least once a year (I've been failing recently) to what feels like my second home: Val D’Isere – by far and away the best ski area I’ve ever visited.
It's not all fun and games
I have been a web guy ever since stumbling across the then nascent Internet in 1994 during my first year at Loughborough University. I was instantly hooked and I have been involved with the web in some shape or form ever since, having held a number of different roles ranging from a web developer to a UX architect to a product manager.
This range of roles left me with a very broad set of skills and, in 2009, I decided to put them to good use by founding a startup targeting small to medium sized providers in the Equity Release market with a SaaS offering to help shepherd cases from quotation through to completion and servicing.
Due to an ever-shrinking market as a result of consolidation, I took the difficult decision to shutter the business at the end of 2016. Since then I have made a move into engineering leadership positions, a role I really enjoy as it allows me to put all of my skills to good use and enable others to succeed.
Engineering leadership
I currently head up the platform engineering team at RS Components (the largest company you've never heard of), delivering frameworks, tooling and services that are used by the rest of the product engineering teams to deliver our new cloud-based experiences.
In recent years I have taken a keen interest in GraphQL and have been championing its adoption at RS - our first GraphQL BFF went into production in 2018 and 2020 sees my team beginning work on a single federated data graph that spans the entire organisation.