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Agentic engineering and AI developer tooling

I build AI agent tooling on Claude Code for a team’s software delivery. gSmith, the curriculum authoring and review toolkit I built while developing course material for a Fortune 100 insurer’s upskilling programme, is now used by other authors: with it, a module that would have taken a week to write and review could be done in a day, depending on complexity. Vita, an AI job-application assistant I built for the contractors at the BriX partnership, writes only from what each person has actually done, and the owner and every contractor in the partnership use it.

Thursday, 8 February 2024 Read
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DevOps

I make deployment routine rather than a weekend event. At IBM I led the team that took SalesConnect’s production deployment from up to 72 hours to two hours, freeing 2 people from deployment weekends and saving the operations team over 2,000 hours a year. SalesConnect was the first project in IBM’s CIO production portfolio to deploy through UrbanCode Deploy, and I helped three other product teams adopt the pipeline. On My Sales Activity I built continuous deployment on Jenkins, Travis, Docker and Cloud Foundry through to production on IBM Cloud. In IBM’s XP Farm I wrote infrastructure as code in Terraform, taught teams to use it, and built CI/CD with them up to containerised pipelines. Since then I have hardened nWave’s continuous integration pipeline, contributing fixes across its releases, and delivered on a Fortune 100 insurer’s programme that achieved published gains for the client on three of the four industry-standard software-delivery measures.

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Principal software engineering

I set technical direction and change live systems without stopping them, working as part of your team rather than around it. At IBM I held architecture authority across a partner platform serving 200k users. Before that I led development of My Sales Activity, which cut the lead time on a new incentive from at least six months to a couple of days. Where there is a legacy system in the way, I would rather replace it piece by piece while it stays live than plan a cutover. At IBM I led the development that let three successive migrations run incrementally: an abstraction that connects to both the outgoing and the incoming system is what makes a migration survivable.

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Technical coaching and training

I teach and coach Extreme Programming in COBOL, .NET, Java, Python and JavaScript: test-driven development, working with legacy code, refactoring, clean code and thorough testing, in the classroom and then embedded with your teams. On a Fortune 100 insurer’s upskilling programme I personally taught 800 of the over 3,000 engineers and product managers it reached, and coached up to five cross-functional teams at a time. At IBM I led a software craftsmanship transformation across 1,000 developers in London, Brazil and Mexico, to a standard graded on delivered work rather than self-report.

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