Who am I?
Hi, I’m Michael, an approachable and passionate Head of Development working for a small business based in Manchester, UK. In my spare time, I like to travel the world, watch TV shows & films, socialise with friends & family while enjoying great food & drink.
Having started as a developer, I’m now responsible for a small development team working on large (and small) scale projects and applications. With extensive experience architecting highly-scalable resilient solutions with AWS, and lots of experience with PHP, I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty when necessary. However, more recently I find myself hands-off focussing on removing blockers for my team, while ensuring a confident, stable delivery for all of our projects through a well structured development and continuous integration backed workflow, as well as investing time in helping developers improve themselves, and learn more.
I’m passionate about unlocking the potential of the team around me, and looking at how technology is adapting and shifting around us is key to helping me guide developers forward. Not one to shy away from new things, it’s about choosing the right thing instead of a shiny new thing (which may subsequently be shelved). Infrastructure as Code, and Serverless development (while potentially seen at odds with each other) are more of interest recently as well as digging deep into existing code and realising bottlenecks and rearchitecting the code where suitable to decrease execution times.
What others say ...
I have had the pleasure of knowing Michael for years, first meeting at Summit Awesome, a developer collective he founded that spanned events, hackathons and an active Slack community. The first Summit Awesome I attended was one of those rare events that I seem to still talk about quite regularly. "Oh, you had to be there!"
Above all that Michael wrote hands down the most practical tutorial on PHP Curl on his learning platform Codular which I have shared with many colleagues and recommended it to students at Work In The Web as it is, in my opinion, the best primer out there on the subject.
Having known Michael for longer than I care to remember; he is, and always has been, a dependable and knowledgeable critical friend, when and where I’ve needed it. He has a wide breadth and depth of knowledge and can provide insight and opinions on business and technology problems, which then lead to far better solutions for all.
I owe him huge thanks for the times he has helped me, and even saved me from disaster a few times - and always in good humour and with a friendly smile on his face!
I've known Michael since the inaugural Summit Awesome, way back in August 2012 in Birmingham. Ever since he's been a great friend and all-round amazing person. He's even been to my wedding back in April 2018 in the Netherlands. I know that I can always reach out when I need him and I know he'll be available for me.