I used to be an architect

A personal journey from computer science, through architecture, consulting, sales and programme management, to startup CTO.

Some developers aspire to “move up the ranks” into something else, but this can be an absolute joy killer for many. This talk is about how it took 12 weeks of forced downtime for me to realise that I had strayed horribly.

After 13 years in the IT industry, filled with endless Powerpoint and project meetings I found myself not on a path to career happiness. I picked up some important skills along the way, but made a huge mistake leaving deep technical hands on experience behind. I’ve always been involved with large corporates, with seemingly unlimited IT budgets. Now, as CTO of a Startup, I’ve needed to get things done with little budget, a small team, and my own hands (by swapping Outlook and Powerpoint for slack and emacs)!

This talk will share a series of important career lessons that I have learned, some changes in architectural thinking, and how embracing cloud has allowed us to take on the big players with tiny budgets. I will also talk through how we build and run our systems. This will cover some introduction to our stack (including event sourcing, microservices, containers, CI/CD, and functional programming in JavaScript and Clojure). We run the entire tech stack for a new insurance company with a team of just 3 technical people.

I won’t need anything besides a way to present some slides. The main message that I am trying to communicate is that success for a technical person does not mean giving up the craft that you love. I thought that I needed to “move up the ladder” to have a successful career, and I was miserable. As a startup CTO, I now write code every day, and I just can’t get enough.