Michael Allen Technical Leader

I joined THE to lead on replacing an aging data capture system, which underpins the company's primary revenue stream. Collections 2.0 would allow the THE Data team to self serve using a WYSIWYG visual editor, reducing the cost of creating new collections, removing inter-team dependencies and handovers, and enabling THE to gather more data each year, driving growth in the Data Products revenue.

As a growth critical project, Collections 2.0 involved senior stakeholders from every side of the business. A significant part of my role was to negotiate for mutually good outcomes between the various, sometimes conflicting, stakeholder needs, our Engineering teams expected quality and operability standards, and the time and cost implications of the project plan.

My hiring was part of the Engineering organisation growth from a handful of scrappy engineers. I was empowered by our CTO to set the base standard for new services and drive changes through the team that would level up every project. In this role I focused on tooling modernisation, taking the our teams away from hand-rolled CI and Auth systems to modern SAAS products, and introducing modern software development practices such as Continuous Delivery and Incident Management.

Through the introduction of automated linters, modernisation of tooling, and DORA metrics gathering, I provided management with the evidence needed to calm fears around Continuous Delivery. As a result our production deployments went from once a month, with weeks of manual QA as a quality gate and a change fail rate above 50%, to multiple times a week with a change fail rate below 0.5%.

• • Typescript
  • React
  • NestJS
  • NextJS
  • Kubernetes
  • Harness
• • Matthew Brown

My daughter was born during the second COVID lockdown. Working on a startup during "the event" led me to miss her early moments.

I highly value sharing parental responsibilities and so I left Kantan in April to spend 3 months dedicated to caring for her before starting a new position.

• • Conflict resolution
  • Negotiation
  • Prioritisation of conflicting requirements

Kantan was a startup aiming to become the "OS for Tradespeople". Funded by the OVO Group, they are a small team helping trade professionals work smarter.

As one of the early hires I took a leadership role in planning and prioritising work, improving code quality and helping our team work smarter. I focused on shaping an inclusive culture and improving our systems and tools to unlock the potential of our small team.

From day 1 I took ownership of hard problems, such as a system for dynamic job sheets, designing our solution and splitting it up into incremental improvements so our team could implement a minimum releasable feature as soon as possible.

I'm very proud of the effort my team and I put in to Kantan, delivering a product that our users love against incredibly tight timescales.

• • React Native
  • Typescript
  • Apollo
  • Graphql
  • Python
  • Django

Working as part of a cross-discipline team, I led the creation of a new Content Editor based on the Prosemirror library and React. During initial development I focused on proving the teams main requirements of a simple user interface, interactive components (to allow customisation of content), and multi-user collaboration.

As Prosemirror's interfaces are quite complicated and the library was unknown to the team I built abstractions to integrate Prosemirror with the more familiar world of React. This allowed the team to build powerful interactive components into the editing surface.

After initial implementation and a successful switch of all users to the new Prosemirror editor, I worked on building a powerful version management system that allowed users to track contributions to an article, compare differences between each version and roll back undesired changes.

• • Prosemirror
  • React
  • Node.JS
  • Webpack
  • Heroku

As a Senior React Developer, I worked with a 4 developer team to build the MyAccount section of DAZNs new streaming platform. I took the lead on building a library that integrated MobX with React-router. I treated this library as if it was an open source project, generously documenting it and gathering feedback from users in order to improve it.

Having demonstrated to DAZN that I had a knack for finding and fixing platform level issues I was asked to join the Core team, who are responsible for DAZNs code delivery platform. Here I implemented changes that dramatically reduce integration failures, reduced merge-to-deploy cycle time from 50 mins to 3 mins, and improved developer feedback loops.

• • React
  • Mobx and Mobx-state-tree
  • Node.JS
  • Webpack
  • Drone CI
  • AWS Lambda

As Lead Maintainer, I built and released an open source library that makes building the "One question per page" style services easier.

I drew on my previous experience with Apply for Divorce and Register to Vote to solve the hard problems involved with One per Page transactions.

In developing this framework I put a lot of effort in to researching with real users, gathering their feedback to ensure that the interfaces I designed were easy to understand and flexible enough to customise to their need.

• • Node.JS
  • Express
  • Webpack
  • Nunjucks
  • Sass
• • One per Page
  • Look and Feel
• • Jason Paige

As Technical Lead, I led a large team in the development of the Apply for Divorce service from Discovery through to release and iteration of a successful Private Beta. I shaped the technical design and pushed for constantly better software and software delivery.

In order to prevent blocking the team while we hired more Ops staff, I worked with a fellow Tech Lead in advocating for and building a more reliable, automated, Infrastructure. Together we reinvigorated the programme's Ops team and brought more modern release practices to the development pipeline.

• • Node.JS
  • Express
  • Webpack
  • Jinja / Nunjucks
  • Ansible
• • Rhys Williams
  • Chris Neale

As Infrastructure Engineer, I built an automated delivery pipeline that could to deploy in to a highly secure environment that we had no access to.

• • Ansible
  • Terraform
  • Vagrant
  • Python
  • Django
  • Jinja
• • Lighthouse code
  • Infrastructure code
• • Roo Reynolds
  • Rich Brantingham

As Technical Lead, I led a 7 person team in the development of the Sign your Mortgage service. The team comprised of a mix of contractors and Civil Servants, who were new to development. We used pair programming and workshops to support them in learning the skills necessary to own the service once complete.

I designed the system architecture iteratively based on discussions with the Product Owner and investigation of the requirements with Land Registry subject matter experts.

• • Python
  • Puppet
  • Vagrant
  • AWS
  • Jinja
  • Flask
• • Dev VM
  • Borrower Frontend
  • Conveyancer Frontend
  • Case API
  • Deed API
  • Scribe
• • Andrew Jackson

As Technical Lead, I worked closely with the DWP teams Product Owner and Technical Architects to rebuild their waterfall plan in to an iterative backlog.

Through initial Alpha to Beta and Live release, I worked as the primary engineer on the Register to Vote frontend application, designing the component architecture for the Frontend app and implementing a significant amount of the components.

I worked closely with the Designer and Researcher to ensure that the app held to the best experience possible for the user.

• • Scala
  • Play Framework
  • Mustache
• • Register to Vote Service
  • IER Frontend source code
• • Martyn Inglis
  • Peter Herlihy