Conducting interviews is a challenge but there’s 1 part that comes easy: selling the company. I’m not a salesperson at all but this part of the interview process is just explaining the interesting things the engineering team does. Talking to people about how we work at Passenger is great —…

In a first for Passenger, we've released an app before it’s ready. This has been our plan since the Passenger board signed off to take our new myTrip product to market. …

I’ve always had a background curiosity in behavioural economics and systems thinking. The coronavirus pandemic has increased my interest in these topics and after reading up on things like the financial crisis of 2008, I’m sharing some thoughts on how we can act today. …

Note: this is a half-finished thought that is only just worth sharing. Feedback welcome. A team depends on how well its members work together, not how well they work in isolation. Yet organisations often only try to improve an individual's performance in isolation. I'm guilty of this too: it's much…

What's the biggest thing you can remove without negative consequences? Lines of code? Sentences from a document? Whole source files? Tasks? Servers? Documents? Processes? Projects? This is an indicator of how performance-orientated and adaptable a company's culture is. Conversely, bureaucratic companies tend to reward inputs, so adding lines of code…

In the (almost) 10 years I’ve been at Base, the engineering team has grown by a factor of 10. This year the team has almost doubled and we’ve taken on 3 new developers in less than a month. Growing a team is exciting. Through growth comes new capabilities, opportunities and…

The database landscape was largely unchanging years ago. There was still innovation but it stayed tethered to SQL. SQL was king. DBAs wrote stored procedures and DevOps hadn’t been born. At this time there was a 90% chance you had a single database architecture that was either Microsoft SQL, Oracle…

Our core product Passenger has been on a growth spurt, so we’re often on the lookout for new people to join our team at Base. This means I’ve been spending more of my time talking to potential candidates about how the production team works on a day-to-day basis. In interviews…

Three months ago I decided to loose weight. It’s been an interesting journey and had a big impact in my life, so I’m sharing my experiences here. Hopefully they’ll encourage others to start loosing weight and being healthier. Inspiration I was on a business trip for a few days at the…