About Me

I’m a full-stack (read: Jack of all trades) Tech Lead at Dunelm, working with Typescript, AWS, CDK, React and more. I’m a real developer advocate, with a keen focus on DevEx, and I strongly believe that good engineers need to be enabled, rather than held back. Having worked in smaller teams, I’m relishing the opportunity to work at scale, solving high-performance engineering problems, using modern technology.

You’ll usually find me with a strong coffee in one hand, whilst I type sarcastic replies into Slack with the other. I’m keen to mentor colleagues and friends, and believe in lifting others up.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that I’d rather hire, be hired by, and work with human beings, not robots or CVs. This attitude has led to me turning down roles where I’ve got bad vibes from interviewers (Seriously what is it that makes people interviewing become so toxic?), or where they expect more of my time than is reasonable (no 8 hour take-home tests thankyou). I think this is a skill more people could take advantage of. Work comes second to the real world, and you’re hiring CVs, not brains-in-jars. We should all act like it.

I’m always interested to hear from interesting people, and help solve interesting problems. So, reach out to me!

This blog #

* Warning, this section contains strong Emacs advocacy *

I’m a strong advocate of open source technologies, a serverless convert, and a proud Emacs user. You’ll be unsurprised then, to hear that this blog is a combination of AWS, Hugo, and org-mode.

Org mode allows me to write posts and create pages in a superior-to-markdown format. An example from this post:

** DONE About Me
CLOSED: [2022-11-09 Wed 15:26]
:PROPERTIES:
:export_hugo_section: /about
:export_file_name: _index
:END:
I'm a full-stack (read: Jack of all trades) Tech Lead at
[[https://engineering.dunelm.com][Dunelm]],
working with Typescript, AWS, CDK, React and more.
I'm a *real developer advocate*, with a keen focus on DevEx...

Org mode allows me to use markdown-esque formatting for blogposts, with a built-in markdown editor with previews.

But thats what Typora, Dillinger, Macdown and VSCode do!

— You, an unenlightened individual

Ah well, dear reader, that’s where you note the :PROPERTIES: section. This allows me to do… well, pretty much anything. ox-hugo will pass this as custom frontmatter for a post, I can have custom org-mode-only stuff in here, whatever. org-mode also allows me to track TODO states on posts and items (and will only publish items marked DONE - the rest are considered drafts!), auto-fill the post date from the time/date the post was marked complete… It’s pretty snazzy and I strongly recommend you try it out!

As for hosting? Well, the hugo blog sits in a Gitlab repo. All commits to master run a build & deploy pipeline, which pushes the files to an S3 bucket. From there we simply face Cloudfront in front of the bucket, and use Route53 and AWS Certs to manage DNS and SSL. It’s really rather seamless, and requires me to run a grand total of zero infrastructure.

Snazzy, huh?