In June 2016 I was working for a venture capital backed media startup called The Tab. As the CTO one of my core focus areas was enabling a team of 7 engineers to reinvent student journalism across the UK and US. Having come to the end of a venture funding round I had a decision […]
The last twelve months have been a very turbulent time in the media industry with profit forecasts and jobs being slashed across both digital and print. Growing a sustainable business in the modern diversified world of media is a hard nut to crack. This is even harder when you have to raise funds every 12 […]
Competitively actionable analytics was a core element of the technology and product strategy at The Tab. The below details how this approach has translated into product and how that went on to affect user behaviour. The Tab had built a set of micro services to data mine Facebook, WordPress and Google Analytics which created a rich […]
I spent nine months in 2014 designing, building and iterating an Android app called Metro10 for the UK Newspaper Metro. This taught me a lot about the benefits and frustrations of native app development and marketing. The benefits of app users are huge in terms of their engagement and propensity to return daily. Being able […]
My recent personal and professional development efforts have taken a microservices approach. This escalated to having 8 services running 3 different languages across 5 different frameworks. After banging my head against the command line for a few days trying to get these to coexist I decided to try Docker containers to attempt streamline and simplify […]
While working at ANDigital we used multiple languages/frameworks/web servers for both internal projects and external client work. Our goal was to be able to continuously deploy each of the services that we were involved with. I came to the conclusion that scripted virtualisation for local development put us on the right track to achieving this […]
For 275 days after his birth my son Jack lived in the intensive care units of various London hospitals. A large team of consultants, doctors, nurses and cleaners worked together 24/7 to support Jack’s daily needs whilst solving his long term health problems. Managing complex projects is a large part of my job so being […]
For the past four years I have been working in an editorial environment Metro, the third largest daily UK newspaper. Over this time I have been amazed at the number of times that serious change has been attempted and failed. This seems to be a common problem with newspapers. Initially it confused me as there […]
Over the past four years at Metro we have delivered one replatform, four redesigns, multiple native apps and built and sold an online casino. From these experiences we have iteratively built a process and environment that aids product development. An Agile mindset has helped the development team achieve a consistent output. This coupled with Lean […]
The majority of content placement on metro.co.uk is now managed by software. This has been a long journey based on real world feedback and incremental addition of complexity. My goal has always been to take a developer’s view of the editorial process and optimise where possible. Looking at the numbers it became clear that for […]