Creating Content for Made Tech

Introduction

My time at Made Tech has come to an end (it’s my last day tomorrow, 17 June 2022). I’ve worked with some wonderful people in my time with the company and I will miss them all terribly 😢

My new role (starting in July) is Platform Engineering Manager - Developer Experience at Cazoo. I must say, I am pretty excited to get cracking!

Creating Content

I’ve been fairly involved in creating content in collaboration with the Made Tech marketing team over the last two years. In order to centralise this info somewhere that’s easy to find, I’ve listed the webinars and blog posts I was involved with below.

One of the things that always bugged me about the creation of these pieces of content was that I received all the praise and positive feedback about them when in fact, there was always a whole team supporting me, advising me, and cheering me on. I gave them a lot of kudos internally at Made Tech, but I think it’s important to also mention how awesome they are here. A big thank you to, in no particular order:

• Jack Harrison
• Karsyn Robb
• Laura Plaga

Delivery Doesn’t Finish In Production

This was my first blog post, written while I was in the chalet (Made Tech calls their bench “the chalet”) waiting to be deployed to a client project. You can find it here.

This post is broadly focused on measuring outcomes over outputs, as well as some DevOps thinking around system evolution, tech debt, monitoring, performance, security, and privacy.

How to Upskill Your Technical Teams Effectively

This was a webinar I put together (along with an associated blog post) about a high-level strategy for approaching the upskilling of technical teams. Unsurprisingly, it includes some discussion around using communities of practice to help you to achieve this goal.

Enhancing Developer Productivity In Legacy Codebases

A webinar (and blog post) about modernisation, testing, replatforming, and refactoring in legacy codebases.

This talk was presented at the Leeds Digital Festival.

Driving Modernisation With The DVLA: A Case Study In Collaboration And Automation

My third and final Made Tech webinar (with an associated blog post written by Cami Hogg) which talks about our collaboration with the DVLA to help drive the modernisation of their systems.

Closing Thoughts

It’s been a fun two years at Made Tech, and it’s felt good to spend some time this evening looking back at these presentations (and thinking back to the butterflies I always got in my stomach before presenting them 😅).

Butterflies aside, to anyone considering presenting webinars I would say: do it! It’s a rewarding experience, and I believe it is a great way to learn how to put longer talks together in a less initimidating environment than a live lightning talk or a conference stage.