Mullumbimby, New South Wales, Australia
In 2017, I started a consultancy (Blackmill) to help technology organisations evolve their engineering and communication processes. I'm a dedicated engineering leader who has led teams at Forage, Data61, GitHub, Neo, Microsoft, Atlassian, and News. I was an organiser of Rails Camp USA East in 2016. I have served Ruby Australia as both Vice-President and General Member. I live in northern NSW, but work with clients across Australia, the US, New Zealand, and elsewhere. I went to Sydney’s first Ruby on Rails meet up in 2006 and have been an active member of the Australian Ruby community ever since. I’ve been to more than 30 Rails Camps run in Australia, New Zealand, and the US – including organising one. When I lived in Sydney, I ran a coworking space called The Workbench and helped organise the Sydney JS meetups. Before Microsoft, two friends and I spent 2 months doing spikes into the 10 hardest technical problems we saw in making an email app to replace Gmail. We did not resolve all of them. I still want to build it someday. Mostly I want to help engineers work in effective environments that value them.
Blackmill helps scaleups ship again. We believe thoughtful engineering practices lead to quality, stability, and effectiveness.
Elle Meredith and I kicked off Folklore's Engineering Chapter with the first session: From IC to Management. As leaders advance, it can become more difficult to remain directly involved in technical work, and there are expectations of delivering high quality results channeled through their team, retaining and upskilling team members, and crucially – fostering trust through consistent one-on-one communication, open dialogue, clear expectations, and supporting the team's growth. We talked about how leadership roles vary significantly based on company size, culture, product, and maturity. The traditional career ladder in startups generally involves progressing from IC into management and leadership positions. However, engineering leadership roles are not one-size-fits-all, and each journey is unique. Having clear and concise expectations of the overall vision and being prepared for the unique challenges ahead will differentiate the operators from the leaders.
As Vice President, my role was supporting the President and other members of the organising committee. In addition, I was responsible for documentation, member surveys, and supporting events.