Welcome to my blog.
Who Am I? Tempting to say Will.I.Am as I do like his music, but in this distributed remote first world most often I’m referred to by my slack handle at work as @fireatwill.
I’ve been many things over the years. I’m dad to my daughter Lily and son Jackson, husband to Caroline my wife, head of engineering, mountain biker, lover of unique beers (my wife is belgian and I confess a love for Gueuze which like my tastes in 90s pop culture are a bit of an acquired taste) and tinkerer.
I’ve been building system in code and with people for almost 20 years. I love knowing why things are what they are and going deep on connecting the dots of the how with the why, so its no surprise I ended up where I am. I’ve blogged on and off on internal corporate blogs over the years but finally thought it time to make an effort to share some of the lessons learned along the way more broadly and connect with other like minded folk on their experiences.
Probably the most interesting story for me has been the past 6 years with Atlassian. Prior to that most of my focus had been on building software and teams, but I joined Atlassian at the beginning of its current cloud journey and one of the biggest learning opportunities here for me has been the shift from the traditional focus on building software for functional requirements to what it means to build and run systems at scale. The ship, learn and iterate that comes from running these system, the debates on how you measure reliability and the challenges that come out of lesser explored non-functional requirements that come to the forefront at 3am when things go bump in the night have been some of the funner problems to puzzle over.
I hope you may learn something, share back but most of all enjoy.
Fire At Will 