About

Everything you wanted to know, neatly packaged.

Bio

I’m a Technical Software Manager at Oxford Nanopore Technologies. I lead a team of software engineers and make internal developer tools that, ideally, prevent other engineers from wanting to throw their laptops into the sea.

Eight years of doing this has taken me across the entire stack. C systems programming. React web apps. Robotics middleware. Python CLI tools. If it involves making software work or more often, figuring out why it doesn’t, I’ve probably touched it.

I care about developer experience, observability tooling, and building systems that make engineers productive instead of miserable. These are related goals.

When I’m not writing code or pretending to know what I’m doing in meetings, I’m exploring AI-assisted development and tinkering with whatever technology seems interesting enough to justify the time investment.

Skills & Technologies

Languages

Typescript

Javascript

Python

C++

Frontend & Desktop

React

NextJS

Electron

Tailwind CSS

HTML/CSS

Backend

NodeJS

PostgreSQL

Redis

REST

gRPC

DevOps & Tooling

Docker

GitLab CI

Github Actions

AWS

Vercel

Cloudflare

Experience

Oxford Nanopore Technologies

Technical Software Manager

Employment Type: Full-time

Employment Period: April 2023 – Present

I manage a team of four software engineers. This involves the usual suspects: mentoring, objectives, performance reviews, and convincing people that their work matters, because it does.

Most of my time goes into building internal developer tools: log aggregation platforms, deployment management apps, and dashboards that make platform operations slightly less painful. The stack is React, NextJS, Electron, Typescript and Python, depending on what needs hitting.

A significant portion of my sanity has gone into making C++ builds behave like civilized software. Conan, CMake, Docker, Artifactory. Some engineers are converts. Others look at me like I’ve suggested we rewrite everything in Rust.

UK Atomic Energy Authority (RACE)

Software Engineer & Section Leader

Employment Type: Full-time

Employment Period: November 2021 – April 2023

Led a software development team. Mentored engineers, allocated work, ran reviews, hired people. The leadership trifecta.

I was a key contributor to CorteX, RACE’s robotic middleware for distributed systems. This meant integrating with ROS2, Qt, OPC-UA, and EtherCAT, plus building interfaces for industrial manipulators using whatever proprietary API the hardware vendor decided to inflict on us.

Helped put CI/CD pipelines and Git workflows in place. Infrastructure work, the sort that only gets mentioned when its missing.

Control Systems Software Engineer

Employment Type: Full-time

Employment Period: December 2017 – November 2021

Core team member on CorteX from the early days. Wrote cross-platform code in modern C++ and Python. Built monitoring and control interfaces in Qt. Wrote tests. Ran Valgrind until the memory leaks stopped haunting me.

I was the primary technical contact for external partners and supervised year-in-industry students who were somehow even more confused than I was when I started.