Published in FT Product & Technology·Apr 29, 2021One year later — Lessons learned from remote onboardingTwelve months ago, in the midst of COVID-19, lockdowns, quarantining and social distancing, I was one of many people to start a new job. I joined the FT in April last year, about a month after the first lockdown started in the UK. …Onboarding6 min read
Dec 30, 20202020 in reviewHave you ever seen a cage fight? Where two MMA fighters go head-to-head until one of them concedes? I think of it as the more gruesome older sibling of boxing. Every so often there is a fight where one of the fighters gets completely destroyed. Just imagine, you are an…4 min read
Published in FT Product & Technology·Nov 25, 2020Technical Leadership in Customer Products at the FT“A Tech Lead is a software engineer responsible for leading a team and alignment of the technical direction” — Pat Kua [1]. While this is a useful high-level definition of the Tech Lead role, it’s not very specific to an actual business. You’ll find that technical leadership roles vary greatly…Software Development8 min read
Published in JavaScript in Plain English·Nov 11, 2020Lazy-load images with the Intersection Observer API and ReactThe Intersection Observer API allows you to observe and react to changes when an element enters the viewport or a parent element. It’s very commonly used for lazy loading but can also be used for things like animations or changing the active state of links in a navigation bar as…Java Script5 min read
Published in ITNEXT·Aug 10, 2020Animating list reordering with React HooksA little while ago I was given a cool design for an Instagram story styled bubble component where each bubble would smoothly slide into its new position when we got its new order from the API. While it can be straightforward to do a whole load of animations and transitions…React Hook6 min read
May 1, 2020Are you Learning, Earning and Advancing?Evaluating your role and comparing it with others — I once got great advice while overhearing someone else’s conversation. My old tech lead was chatting with another engineer in my team and he said something along the lines of: “In any job I regularly think about whether I’m Learning, Earning and Advancing. …Career Development5 min read
Feb 27, 2020Widen your impact as an engineerOver the years, my understanding of what it takes to grow as an engineer and climb my career ladder has changed dramatically. When I started out, I was confident all I needed to do was to become an amazing coder. …Career Development6 min read
Jan 21, 2020Stretching yourself as a new engineerI gave a talk called Junior.next() at a few different events. This is a written version of a section in that talk. Over the upcoming weeks I also plan to write about all the other parts too :) So, I don’t mean this to sound cringey, because it sounds cringey…Technology5 min read
Jan 4, 20202019 in reviewIn my attempt to write more in 2020, I want to start by looking back and reflecting over 2019. In 2018 I enjoyed a busy year of travel, speaking and breaking out of my comfort zone in my day to day work. After the whirlwind of that year, 2019 was…Conference4 min read
Jan 7, 2019JavaScript: Async / AwaitI’ll be honest, I was a teeny bit disappointed when async and await became a real thing in JavaScript. Not because they aren’t great, but because I literally just got my head around promises, and was excited to write them more 😂 Never mind. It is by no means wasted…Java Script4 min read
