Blog
Posts about life, engineering management, the web industry, and things that I've been up to
2019
27 August 2019
Life as a manager means that I go to a lot of meetings. Over time it's very easy for them to get a bit unruly, and for your calendar to start managing you rather than the other way round. Every now and again I've found it's good to take stock, to tip everything out and start again, in the form of a calendar defrag. Here's how I approach it, and a tool you can use if you'd like to join me.
28 April 2019
Since joining Monzo as an engineering manager at the start of December I've experienced a huge amount. In this post I wanted to capture some of what I've been up to, and what I'm looking forward to next.
9 February 2019
Since returning to employee status I've been thrown back into having an absolutely stacked calendar. Over the last couple of weeks I've been playing with an emoji-based system to help me work better.
Learning Japanese (part two) 🇯🇵
27 January 2019
This week I received the very happy news that I'd passed my second Japanese exam - the JLPT (日本語能力試験) at level N4. In this post I'll outline my exam experiences and go through the resources I used.
3 January 2019
I really enjoy this time of year. Christmas is always a bit of a whirlwind due to numerous individual family gatherings and birthdays, but New Year is always a nice lull. As always I’m using a blog post as a prompt to look both back and ahead.
2018
20 November 2018
I’m so excited to announce that I’m soon going to be starting the next chapter in my professional life. I’m going back to employment, and joining Monzo on their mission to “build a bank with everyone, for everyone”.
A foundation for technical investigations
8 October 2018
A high-level structure for asking people about their technology, with a view of looking at how things are and identifying how they might be.
Thinking about permissions on the web
27 September 2018
A collection of musings on the topic of web permissions, and the kind of questions that we should be asking for the future.
24 August 2018
Since the beginning of this year I've been taking my Japanese learning a lot more seriously. Having been asked about it by quite a few people, this post is intended to summarise my journey so far.
Japan, January '18 (part two) - EVO
9 February 2018
This is the second post in a two-part series, capturing my latest trip over to Japan. In this post I'll be talking about the main reason for our visit - EVO.