In other people’s words
Everything else on this site is me showing you how I think. This is the page where other people get a word in. “Great to work with” doesn’t tell you much on its own, so each quote comes with a little about the work behind it.
dxw
dxw is a digital agency that works with the public sector. I came in as a contractor to tech lead a project for Hackney Council, and stayed to run technology.
An agency sells technical expertise, but it’s a commercial business, and it grows in lurches: win work, scramble for people to do it, hit a lull, scramble for work. Clare and I ran the side of the business that delivered the work; I’ll let her say how that went.
Dom is a confident, analytical and effective senior leader, and I really enjoyed working with him. Together we ran the delivery unit and had responsibility for 45 permanent staff and £6 million annual turnover. Dom was instrumental in scaling the unit in a sustainable and efficient way. In 3 years we increased turnover by 160% and went from breakeven to profits of 15%.
Geckoboard
Geckoboard makes dashboards that put a team’s key numbers on a screen in the office. They wanted to separate two things that had been tangled together in their code from the start: organisations and groups. It was the kind of change that touches everything, but they didn’t want to down tools to make it. So they brought me in for four weeks, which became eight, to unpick it while the team carried on.
The tricky part was that the code lived in a shared library used by eight separate applications, so every change had to be released, rolled out everywhere, and kept backwards-compatible so nothing went down mid-deploy. Along the way I pulled permission checking, which every app had been doing its own way, into a single place.
Dom is a rare find. Not only is he an incredibly talented and efficient developer who delivers exceptional work and guidance but he’s a level head and true pleasure to work with. I would be excited to work with him again.
That summer they brought me back to help kick off a new project.
GOV.UK
GOV.UK was first created as a new citizen-facing website to replace the very orange DirectGov. Then they moved publishing for all the central government departments onto it. And then, not long after I joined, everything was reshuffled to transition more than 300 agencies and arm’s-length bodies onto it. I was asked to tech lead one of the teams doing it.
A couple of months in, and it was clear that we were stuck in treacle. So Tom put us all in a room and told us1 it wasn’t impossible, merely extremely hard, and that we were going to work through our conflict and tell him how we’d get it done. It was two days of sweat and tears. Soon after, I ended up being asked to tech lead a second team, and I led both teams through the rest of the transition.
Dom is one of our most experienced, excellent and generally2 empathetic lead developers.
Tom later asked me to come and work with him on Universal Credit, and I turned him down for the NHS.UK alpha. I don’t regret my choice, but he was a great leader, and I do sometimes wonder “what if”.
DigiResults
Andy and I met as roommates3 in our first year at university. A decade later we founded DigiResults together: a marketplace where people selling digital products could recruit affiliates to sell them on commission. We processed $3.8M of sales.
Dom’s grasp of the big picture was one of our best assets at DigiResults. He understood that in start-up companies, everything’s connected. And that meant when I gave Dom a problem, I knew it wasn’t just going to lead to more work for me further down the line. When Dom took on a problem, that problem just went away.
Andy has since founded another company and sold it, so “CEO and co-founder” rather undersells him.