Profile

We’ve got two grown-up kids. One works backstage in the theatre business and the other teaches at a university in Africa. These days a lot of my time at work involves managing teams of people – funny how much computer science involves people! To compensate I mess around with code and computers as a hobby and as a volunteer teaching tech to kids and adults.

Making things more digital can’t be done by one person coding on their own. It takes a team effort so I spend a lot of time finding the people we need to be in the team, helping them understand what needs to be done, getting things ready so we can all work well together and fixing problems – there are often a lot of problems to fix! To help people I need to understand how they work so I am always learning about new things. Recently I’ve been learning about AI (Artificial Intelligence) so we can use this to help people in a safe way.

I never have two days that are the same. Some people would find that nerve wracking but I love it and would probably get bored if I had a routine. Day by day, different problems arise and, mostly, we fix these so that they don’t happen again so, on the next day, we are working on something new. Things change in other ways too. For example it takes a few weeks or maybe a month or two to make a new digital service or make a big improvement to one we already have so in a few weeks time we will move on to another one in a new area. Another example is that I move around and help different teams so every few months I meet new people, try to learn about their work and help them find the digital things so they can get more done and serve more people.