What I’ve been up to

  • Jan 2022 ⇉⇉⇉ … Lead Software Developer at Mountain Warehouse
  • Jan 2022 ⇉⇉⇉ Jan 2024 Principal Software Developer at a gov.uk
  • 2019 ⇉⇉⇉ … Technical Specialist & Author for ContentLab.io
  • 2018 ⇉⇉⇉ 2022 Technical Lead Engineer for C# .NET at a gov.uk
  • 2016 ⇉⇉⇉ 2018 Software Engineer at a gov.uk
  • 2008 ⇉⇉⇉ 2016 School Teacher 11-18 Computer Science ☆ Head of Year ☆ Head of Department.

Things I write about for other people

Most of what I do is 👻 ghostwritten but I do get authorship credit sometimes:

Microsoft-commissioned 3-Part Blog Series on GitOps with Terraform plans, GitHub, GitHub Actions, and Azure

Microsoft-commissioned 3-Part Blog Series on Azure Arc

Docker

Guest post on Docker blog: Deciding Between Docker Desktop and a DIY Solution

Mattermost (2 Blog Articles)

Mattermost is the leading open source collaboration platform. I was asked to write 2 articles.

Microsoft-commissioned 3-Part Blog Series on Teams and PowerApps

Some other topics I’ve ghostwritten on recently

  • A white paper on secure supply chains
  • Best Practices For Secure Development From Home
  • Distributed systems tracing with OpenTelemetry in .NET Core (with example dockerised services)
  • Caching in ASP.NET Core
  • Distributed caching (example .NET application written)
  • Breaking up monolithic applications into microservices
  • Python Flask authentication with OpenID Connect (including example application)
  • Technical debt
  • Continuous Integration and Deployment pipelines
  • Developer workspaces and ‘Flow’
  • Outsourcing testing
  • Testing low-code/no-code applications
  • Documentation for a PDF .NET library (including example application)
  • Identity Management (a paper comparing customer-facing and internal systems)
  • Integrating a leading open source collaboration platform with Jenkins and other examples

Talks and Conferences

  • Contributor, Government Transformation Summit, May 2023.
  • Guest appearance on Day Two Cloud, a Packet Pushers podcast, to talk about OpenTelemetry. Listen to it here or on your favourite podcast platform via pod.link.
  • Talk: The Modern Observability Problem and OpenTelemetry. February 2023, DevOps North East.
  • Talk: The Modern Observability Problem and OpenTelemetry. October 2022, Homes England Software Community.
  • Contributor, Government Transformation Summit, September 2022.
  • Lightning talk: Introducing Azure App Configuration. January 2020, UK Hydrographic Office

Awards

  • 1 Jan 2019 - CodeProject MVP 2019 MVA Most Valuable Author Award - ‘We recognize and value your exceptional contributions and commitment to the technical communities worldwide. By sharing your real world expertise and technical skills, you demonstrate outstanding technical community leadership.’
  • 15 Nov 2018 - First Prize: Best Article of October 2018 with A Re-Introduction to C# References Post C# 7
  • 24 Aug 2018 First Prize: Best Article of July 2018 with A Super-Simplified Explanation of .NET Garbage Collection
  • 18 May 2018 First Prize: Best C# Article of April 2018 with C# Debug vs. Release Builds and Debugging in Visual Studio – from Novice to Expert in One Blog Article
  • 23 Mar 2018 - First Prize: Best C# Article of February 2018 with Addressing a Simple Yet Common C# Async/Await Misconception