About me
How I got here
I learned to code because developers were expensive. I was running HiredinChina, a recruitment platform I built while living in Hangzhou, and I kept needing more complex solutions. The developers I was working with had moved to AWS Lambda, so I decided to learn it myself. That kicked off everything.
Through building my own products alongside professional employment (a language learning platform, an automated Etsy pipeline, an LLM-powered enterprise chatbot), I built a portfolio that eventually landed me a contract at BBC iPlayer, one of the UK's highest-traffic platforms, serving tens of millions of users.
I've had more business failures than successes, and I've learnt from every one of them. That combination of startup scrappiness and enterprise-scale delivery is what I bring to every engagement.
What I believe
Serverless infrastructure should be built with the Cloud Development Kit. Building via the console or raw CloudFormation is not repeatable, not reviewable, and doesn't scale. CDK gives you type-safe infrastructure as code, applying the same rigour you'd apply to application code to the infrastructure underneath it.
Good DevOps comes first. Before writing features, a team needs separate repositories to reduce merge conflicts, autonomous pull request checks, and a CI/CD pipeline that ships small changes frequently. Agile and AWS Operational Excellence both say the same thing. It's worth doing right at the start.
AWS Community Builder
Accepted into the AWS Community Builders programme, a global community of AWS enthusiasts and technical practitioners. I contribute through writing, sharing patterns, and engaging with the serverless community.