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About me

I am Chief Technology Officer of Isotoma, the company I founded nearly 20 years ago, along with my long-term business partner Andy Theyers. I am also CTO of Pebble, a leading UK schools finance SaaS platform and Plan 4 eHealth, a new venture providing resource planning and management SaaS software to hospitals. These are businesses in which Isotoma has invested and that I am pleased to be able to contribute to.

My interests and expertise concern:

  • Strategy; particularly technology strategy
  • Risk; its management, planning, trade-offs, measuring and communication
  • Quality
  • Organisational design
  • High performance technical teams: how to build them, lead them and manage them
  • Technology projects, particularly how to set them up for success, early decision making, process, lifecycle and key transition and inflection points
  • Architecture and design; how to conduct it, how to communicate it, how to manage it throughout a lifecycle, particularly in areas of high ignorance
  • Economics; how to manage and express economic goals and constraints within a sociotechnical framework
  • And ultimately more important and covering all of these: the soft stuff - how to work with people to build a positive culture and organisation that can provide the structure and feedback to support all of this

Aside from that, I'm defensibly expert in these (largely because I am old enough to have already screwed up sufficiently in them):

  • Computer systems security
  • Systems performance design and management
  • Continuous deployment and Infrastructure-as-Code
  • Distributed systems and parallel computing
  • Public cloud systems, particularly Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure
  • The Linux operating system
  • I code in far too many languages, Python and Typescript with the most facility, but for the good of us all I probably shouldn't.

My personal interests include:

  • History, philosophy, politics and economics
  • The Internet more broadly, as a cultural phenomenon
  • The future
  • Electronic music

I am known as "winjer" on a lot of social media, for historical reasons.