A Decade of Leadership: Celebrating Joe Parry's Legacy at the JavaScript & NodeJS Cambridge Meetup Group

This post celebrates and thanks Joe Parry as he takes a well-deserved bow and steps down from his role as the head of the JavaScript & NodeJS Cambridge Meetup Group.

He has been an extraordinary leader who has dedicated the past ten years to fostering a vibrant community of Javascriptors in Cambridge.

Empowering Engineers: How Cambridge University Press Adopted a Shift Left Culture

Companies must be agile and respond quickly to changing customer needs in today's fast-paced and constantly evolving technology landscape. That's why DevOps practices that emphasise collaboration and communication between development and operations teams to deliver software rapidly, reliably, and at scale have become increasingly popular.

Shifting left, a core principle of DevOps can significantly benefit companies of all sizes. By empowering engineers to take on more operations responsibilities and promoting a culture of experimentation and innovation, companies can improve collaboration, increase reliability, and deliver high-quality software at scale.

In this post, I'll discuss how and why Cambridge University Press adopted a shift left culture.

Introducing Typescript at Cambridge University Press

Having worked with many clients who struggled to maintain Javascript projects, Typescript was a no brainer when choosing what to use for the project I was leading.

In this post, I'll share what and how I managed the challenges of introducing and using Typescript.

Introducing Tailwind at Cambridge University Press

Having used Tailwind in my personal projects, I was already a convert of the utility first approach. When I was given the opportunity to lead a new project at Cambridge University Press, Tailwind was the first tool I reached for.

In this post, I'll discuss why and how using Tailwind worked out for us.

Introducing Code-First GraphQL APIs at Cambridge University Press

Having experienced the pain of schema-first GraphQL projects, I wanted to use a different approach for a project I led at Cambridge University Press.

In this post, I'll describe what I used and how using code-first GraphQL worked out for us.

How agile helped Cambridge Assessment to scale

In 2008 the media were reporting on mistakes and delays in marking examination scripts. To ensure they never made the front page of newspapers for the wrong reasons, Cambridge Assessment decided to rethink how they electronically marked examination scripts for millions of students worldwide.

Creating a product culture at Cambridge University Press

In 2015 I was hired by Cambridge University Press to develop a web application providing digital access to over 35,000 books and 1.5 million journal articles, consolidating several smaller sites. The application would go onto have over 2 million users a day and generate £65 million in revenue per year.

It was a fantastic technical learning opportunity, but it was our culture and approach to product development that would teach me the most important lesson of all.