London Tech Insider

Blink is a fast-growing startup, founded here in London, and is focused on creating software for companies with a large ‘frontline’ workforce. A frontline worker is essentially one without a desk, so Blink’s end users can be quite diverse, from tree surgeons to bus drivers or from hospital staff to production line workers. Like employees at all companies, these workers need to manage payroll, book shifts, and communicate with their coworkers. Solutions exist to do all this for normal desk workers, but frontline workers are rarely behind a computer and struggle with these tasks using conventional software. Sean realised this problem several years ago and set about building Blink. Now the company has gathered over £20 million in funding and is expanding quickly into international markets.

In this episode, I spoke to Dimitrios Kofodimos, VP of Growth at Nutmeg. Nutmeg is a key player in the competitive UK online investment management market. We start the episode by outlining exactly what Nutmeg does and understanding the different parts of the service offered by the company. We then moved on to understanding Nutmeg’s competition and what sets them apart. Finally, Dimitrios gave an inside view of Nutmeg’s recent acquisition by JP Morgan.

This week, I speak to John Spindler. He is the CEO of Capital Enterprise, an organisation supporting start-ups in the UK. He is also a seed investor, funding technology companies while they’re in their infancy to help get them off the ground.

In the interview we covered two main topics, an introduction to venture capital and how the London tech scene has evolved over the last decade.

Today I speak to Marco Consolaro and Alex Di Gioia. Together, they run training courses for software engineers as part of their company, Alcor Academy. They are highly experienced software engineers themselves, each of them having around 20 years of experience in the industry.

In this time, they independently came to the same conclusions about what leads to effective development teams. When they met at a previous employer, Marco and Alex began coaching other employees and through this process, they came up with many exercises and innovative approaches to teaching. They captured this knowledge in their book called ‘Agile Technical Practices Distilled’. Following on from the book’s success, they now run Alcor Academy to interactively teach the book’s content and more.

This week I speak to Katja Mordaunt. In her day to day work, she is a freelance web developer, but for today’s episode, we focus on her work starting the Code Reading Club.

The club is based on the idea that surprisingly little attention is given to teach developers how to properly read and understand code. The club aims to address this by teaching participants a range of techniques through carefully designed exercises. Katja clearly explains exactly what’s involved in these exercises later in the episode.

The idea for Code Reading Club was born when Katja heard Felienne Hermans, a previous guest on this podcast, speak about her book, the Programmer’s brain, so make sure to find that episode too.

Find out more about Code Reading Club here: https://codereading.club/

This week I speak to Tom Christie. He is the creator of the Django Rest Framework, a tool which helps software developers write web APIs. The project is extremely popular, with over 1000 individual contributors and 300,000 users. We spend the first part of the episode discussing DRF - it was really interesting to get an insight into the open source world from such a notable contributor.

Funding is a very important issue for the open-source community - all major companies depend heavily on open-source projects to operate, but don’t always offer much in return. As a result, open source contributors have to be creative in how they seek funding to keep their projects alive. In Tom’s case, he set up an organisation called Encode, which corporate sponsors pay into to fund his work. This was another interesting topic of discussion for the latter part of our conversation.

This week I speak to Neil Campbell about the growth manager role that’s becoming more and more popular in the tech industry. In this position, managers have a deep understanding of both the product and marketing sides of the business, leading to a unique perspective where they understand deeply what brings in customers, and how the product can change to achieve this.

Neil recently started as Chief Growth Officer at Smol, a Series B funded, subscription-based eco-cleaning brand. Before this, he worked in a diverse range of roles, including VP of Growth at MoneyBox, so he’s well-qualified to talk about the Growth Manager role!

Many of Neil’s previous roles have been with Series B funded startups, so for the last part of the episode, we also speak about what makes these sorts of companies an especially interesting place to work.

https://smolproducts.com/

Today, I speak to Tristan Palmer, Head of Growth at Elemendar. Elemendar is a technology company which uses machine learning to automate common tasks faced by analysts in the cybersecurity industry.

Specifically, they have created a piece of software called R.E.A.D., pronounced "read", which takes cyber intelligence reports and translates them into a form of computer code known as STIX or MITRE ATT&CK. This saves cyber threat analysts from a time-consuming, monotonous task, freeing them up to do other important work.

https://elemendar.com/

This week I speak to Jon Gould. He has 14 years of experience as a tech recruiter and in this time he has developed quite a unique approach to his job in a number of ways. For example, he is deeply embedded in the Python and Django community in the UK, playing an important role in organising a popular London Django meet-up group. 

Another unique approach Jon takes to recruitment is in the company he founded, which only hires for roles in the niche areas of Django and Python, rather than hiring more widely like other agencies: https://www.foxleytalent.com/

https://twitter.com/jong0uld

This week I speak to Alex Luketa. He is the CTO at Xerini, a software consultancy which he co-founded in 2018. Alex worked for many years as a developer, mostly working in the financial sector. We talk about how Xerini was started and what separates it from other software consulting companies, as well as a few extra topics.

In today's episode I speak to Robert, James and Katie from ‘The Jump’ which is a coding bootcamp based in London.

The loose structure of this episode was to trace through a student experience of before, during and after the bootcamp. We covered topics like the type of backgrounds their students come from, the advantages of learning with a smaller and more personal bootcamp and the support their students continue to receive after the bootcamp finishes.

A testament to the personal approach of the jump was that they welcomed me into their home for this interview. I was also very glad to do the first in-person interview after the winter spike of Covid!

This week’s episode is the second part of a conversation that I had with Gisela Rossi a few weeks ago.

In the first part, we discussed her work as an Engineering Lead at a tech scale-up called Pollen. This was episode 6 of the podcast, if you want to go back and have a listen.

However, in this episode, we're going to talk about a phenomenon Gisela noticed where the work of junior and mid-level developers isn't always fully appreciated. Gisela outlines what developers can do themselves to ensure that their work is properly valued and also what policies organisations can adopt to appropriately value their employees.

This episode is another part of a conversation I had with Francis Irving. This time, we discuss “Redecentralize”, an organisation Francis co-founded which runs several journalistic projects to promote the decentralisation of the internet.

In recent years, control of the internet has become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few companies - the tech giants we are all familiar with. Francis clearly explains why this should concern us, and why we should aim to re-establish the open and democratic ideals of the early internet.

https://redecentralize.org/

In this episode I speak to Francis Irving about the history of version control. For those unfamiliar, version control is how developers manage and track changes to their code. It is absolutely essential in allowing teams of developers to work together productively.

To introduce Francis, he is a formidable programmer and has worked on a number of very impactful projects. One of these is TortoiseCVS, a version control tool he created and which was used by millions of developers around the world. Clearly, as someone responsible for a chapter in the history of version control, he is very qualified to speak on the topic!

Note that this is part of a longer interview with Francis. Stay tuned for more from our conversation!

This week I speak to Nicholas Tollervey. He currently works as a freelance software developer and has also been active in open source projects, as a previous Google Open Source Peer Bonus winner.

Before starting a career in tech, he trained at the Royal College of Music with Tuba as his first instrument. He also briefly worked as a school teacher, which helps explain his interest in using tech for education. For example, Nicholas developed Mu, a beginner friendly text-editor. He was also involved in developing the BBC micro:bit, a project which gave a programmable microcontroller to 1 million school children in the UK. A final project Nicholas has undertaken with an educational theme is the London Python Code Dojo, where participants collaborate in small teams to solve a problem and compassionately review each other’s efforts.

Steve jobs responding to challenge from an engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." - Plutarch

"The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas. Music is not inside the piano." - Alan Kay (inventor of OOP).

In this episode, I speak to Anna Ossowski, who works at Github as a senior community program manager.

She is extremely active in the London tech community, giving many public talks and as an organiser for pyladies London, to name just a couple of her activities! For a podcast which aims to explore the London tech community, she is the ideal first guest!

In this episode, the conversation covers a lot of ground. We talk about Anna’s start in the world of tech, what she does to give back to the community and also the challenges of managing open-source projects.

An introduction to the podcast - what it's about, the motivation behind starting the show and some background on the host.