Last April, I joined the Financial Times as Technical Director for FT.com. This has been a brilliant move. The job search was different from any of my previous job searches, as it involved an explicit step into technical leadership, and here I share how I did it and some things I learned.
When I joined the Government Digital Service in April 2012, GOV.UK was just going into public beta. GDS was a completely new organisation, part of the Cabinet Office, with a mission to stop wasting government money on over-complicated and underperforming big IT projects and instead deliver simple, useful services for the public.
Interviews are not a great way to find out how good someone will actually be at the job. They can also make it easy for your unconscious biases to have too much influence. This has led some to suggest that interviews are broken and we need to find other ways; but it is possible to do interviews in a much fairer and more informative way.
Earlier this year I read High Output Management. This is one of the best books I’ve read on leadership, and I really recommend you read it. Some of the things I took from it are here.
I had long been thinking I must move the SPA site to HTTPS. However, everything is difficult when using shared hosting and I wasn’t sure how to do it. So I was delighted when Johan Peeters and Nelis Boucké proposed a session for the 2017 SPA conference called Why SPA should switch to HTTPS and how easy that is.
As part of my ongoing mission to update the SPA conference website, I had long wanted to replace the CMS. When I realised it was blocking the move to HTTPS, I knew the time was now. This post is about how I did that and what I learned.
When leaving my last job I decided to do an exercise which compares what other people think my strengths are with what I think my strengths are. This is a write-up.
I think GDPR is great. I am really pleased that companies are now being more thoughtful about how they handle my data. For SPA, a conference that has been running for over 20 years, this coincided with a project I had already started to clean up the user data, and here’s what I did.
A few weeks ago I talked about how coding in the open can help you release faster at PipelineConf. This was my last talk as Open Source Lead at the Government Digital Service. Here is the video, slides, links, and a bonus sketchnote!
The SPA conference website deploys to production automatically on merge to master. It is on shared hosting, and setting this up with Travis was a bit tricky, so I’m blogging how I did it in case it’s useful for others.