Hey! I'm Jamie
In no particular order I'm a sports fan, husband, dad, sports fan, hiker, tinkerer, sports fan and product engineering leader. I built this website to showcase some of my professional work, like my CV, blog posts and side projects. So there's a good chance if you're reading this, you mostly want to know about engineering management Jamie rather than juggler, printmaker or barista Jamie. If so, you can download my CV below!
How I work
I've spent over 15 years working in sports betting and entertainment. I love learning new things, and have managed backend, frontend, mobile and data/quant teams along the way. This curiosity was one of the reasons I also built a real-world mobile game to support my local community whilst managing teams (see side projects).
I get energy from working with smart people and helping them to build cool products. I like to stay hands-on not so I can have all the answers, but because I've found trying things myself is the best path to asking those smart people the right questions.
As a leader I also know that empowering, challenging and supporting the people I lead is how I create the most value, so they make smart decisions when I'm not in the room. I think engineers do their best work when they're close to the customer problem they're solving, so I push my teams to play with what they build, talk to the people who use it, and stay curious, learning as they go.
I share my leadership style with every new direct report in their first few days. You can read the current version here.
Some career bits I'm most proud of
- My transition from trading into engineering: from an insane 90 minutes live trading Brazil 1-7 Germany at the 2014 World Cup to leading Incident Command for the 2022 World Cup Final.
- My transition into leadership: from accidentally becoming a manager to being shortlisted for Sky Bet's “Leader of the Year” a few years later.
- One badge of honour: I used to hold the record for Sky Bet's biggest ever inplay trading loss on a single game. I maintain to this day it was a luck rather than a skill issue and it certainly taught me a thing or two about risk and staying calm under pressure!
Speaking
- Yorkshire Full Stack — “Radical Code Reviews”, a lightning talk taking ideas from Kim Scott's Radical Candour and using them to improve how we do code reviews with a growth mindset. Slides here.
- Shaping Effective Product Teams — panel discussion with other Leeds based engineering and product leaders.
- Product Tank Yorkshire — how product and tech can work together to lead teams and build great software.
- AWS Serverless Specialist Solution Architect meetup — guest speaker, presenting to cloud architects on a serverless architecture case study.
For the juggler, printmaker and barista fans
Juggler Jamie
Engineering managers and parents have to be good at juggling. I also like to practice it on the beach. See projects for a juggling game I made (coming soon)!
Printmaker Jamie
Lino cutting: I can't draw but I do enjoy an evening of carving and printing.
Barista Jamie
A slow, ongoing attempt to get better at latte art. Some of it is recognisable.
