Notes on Technology Leadership

How I used Claude to migrate a decade-old WordPress blog to Eleventy in a week, and what the experience taught me about working effectively with AI coding agents.

Reflections on scaling engineering teams from 7 to 70+ people across 10+ teams, covering principles, processes, and lessons learned from managing organizational change.

Reflections on working at a VC-backed media startup, covering revenue growth, fundraising, Facebook's changing dynamics, and lessons learned from 15 months at The Tab.

How we built an analytics platform to drive contributor engagement through competitive gamification, real-time notifications, and actionable data insights at The Tab.

Lessons learned from designing, building, and launching an Android news app for Metro newspaper, covering development, marketing challenges, and user acquisition.

How Docker containers helped manage 8 microservices across 3 languages and 5 frameworks, covering benefits, patterns, and lessons learned from containerization.

While working at ANDigital we used multiple languages/frameworks/web servers for both internal projects and external client work.

For 275 days after his birth my son Jack lived in the intensive care units of various London hospitals.

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.

Over the past four years at Metro we have delivered one replatform, four redesigns, multiple native apps and built and sold an online casino.

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.

For the last two years I have been focused on the design, build and growth of Metro.co.uk utilising the WordPress VIP platform.

Metro 10 was born out of a desire to experiment with native mobile news reading experiences that solved a different problem to our already fully responsive website.

Responsive design was a key enabler of the strategy that enabled Metro to grow to 34m monthly uniques.

Metro10 is the first Android App that I have been involved in from concept to release in the Google Play store.

We have been working on automating large parts of the content ordering on Metro.co.uk since our responsive redesign in Dec '12.

Over the past 12 months Metro has been on an amazing growth curve.

I have just setup some 301 redirects in order to remove /development from the URL of my blog and wrote a handy piece of SQL to simplify 301 redirect WordPress blog htaccess.

I needed a simple SQL script to help me restore WordPress backup localhost to ensure that I didn't have to go through the pain every time that I wanted to bring my data to my local server.

High performing teams can achieve unbelievable performance multipliers over sets of like minded individuals.

I have decided to give my server the final boost in my quest for ultimate cachability and install Varnish cache.

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Mahatma Gandhi Making change a habit is a powerful way of not just creating but maintaining an agile mindset.

I run a small WordPress network on an Amazon Micro Instance and this means that I need to stay on top of caching.

Wendy Lea the CEO of Get Satisfaction gave a presentation at the DMGT Technology Summer School on "The voice of the customer".

I had the pleasure of spending some time at the DMGT Technology Summer School with Bill Raduchel .

Heidi Rozen gave a great talk at the DMGT Technology Summer School simply titled "Failure".

I have spent the last three years at Metro constantly tweaking our development process to fit our environment and teams maturity.

WordPress hacker attacks have been on the rise this year and although I haven't been hacked (touch wood) they have managed to overload my site on a number of occasions.

In the past year I have run two large successful agile projects that have delivered software using the Scrum methodology to build a minimum viable pro...

About six months ago I was sitting in a CTO meeting across DMGT and they were trying to come up with ways that we could improve collaboration across the group.

I was very fortunate to attend the 2013 WordPress VIP Developer conference in Napa Valley this year.

At Metro our development project has multiple product owners who each have their own backlog and want to prioritise them separately using Greenhopper's drag and drop interface.

The initial phase of the responsive redesign of metro.co.uk was a project that spanned 14 two weeks sprints.

I spent this morning running the PageSpeed Insights tool in Google Chrome over this website and it came back with some good tips on how to speed up WordPress Apache to make this site run faster.

This is the second time that I have been through the process of writing a story of how I think that the company I work for should evolve over the next 18 months.

Another challenge that is faced early in projects is how to turn the talented group of individuals assembled into a high performing team.

As I previously wrote Metro decided to use the WordPress VIP platform for their CMS and front end, this post will detail how we set about the initial...

Over the past few years error pages of the Internet have got a lot more interesting.

Metro's existing CMS "WPS" When I joined Metro they were using a custom CMS that used GWT for the admin screens which wrote to a CRX content repositor...

I have been working on migrating a website I did for a friend a while ago from an old ASP.NET application I built to my WordPress Amazon EC2 Instance...

Over the past 12 months I have been working with an amazing team of people at Metro the largest free daily newspaper in the world to migrate their exi...

I have been running multisite WordPress on my Amazon EC2 instance for almost a year and now that I have four sites running concurrently it is time to sort out a proper backup routine.

I need to update my WordPress Apache permissions and I have them set so WordPress doesn't have write access to the main HTML folder.

I was very fortunate to spend two days at LeWeb London 2012 on the 19th & 20th June this year.

Recently I have been going through a process of looking 18 months into the future and as part of that have written a story of to illustrate where we are going and how I am going to help them get there.

Categories vs Tags is one of the biggest decisions around how you setup a good taxonomy using WordPress.

We have been recruiting a Business Analyst for a big project that we have coming up at work.

It started with a conversation regarding Node.js as one of my developers has been using it to write a RESTful API.

As we were working on a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) application for work we had to buy some handsets for testing.

I have been working in software development for ten years and the one constant throughout my whole career is change.

I had an issue with my WordPress edit image not working when I installed it myself on Centos.

I have been doing my best to figure out the Amazon EC2 Apache setup of permissions to enable WordPress to be able to manage all of the files on my Ama...

Here is how to SFTP into your AWS EC2 instance using FileZilla (this was done on a Mac).

I figured that it was finally time for me to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty with WordPress running on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 Linux Micro instance.