CTO interview: John Williams, every path can lead to a tech career
John Williams started in a farm in the North of England, and is now heading Amplience, the headless e-commerce CMS. He explains how university helped him get to where he is, and the different paths to make it in tech.
Could you please give an overview of your career? What are the roles that made you who you are?
I came down an unusual root: I started my IT character later than most. I was working in the North East of England in factories and farms.
That said, I’ve been programming since I was 11 years old and finally decided to do a career in that field when there was a recession in my region.
I followed courses and a university degree because I felt I was behind. I got first class honours, and received an award from the British Computing Society.
It was enough to negotiate a role in a great company: Reuters. It was for an internal product, which gave me exposure to not only developing the software but also supporting it, talking to users. It was hard-core engineering in C++. I spent 4 years there. Then I joined an agency that changed its name, believe it or not, at least 5 times.
Is that when you became more managerial?
I went from being a senior developer to a CTO. I spent lots of time doing jobs like head of architecture, but I moved to CTO by doing an MBA at Imperial College, which gave some rounding around my skillset.
When you’re a tech person, you can either become a more and more technical person or go to more management positions. I realised I needed a wider set of skills than just being a technologist. Business school gave me new perspectives, new skills, and a better understanding of the commercial side.
During the dot-com boom, we went from a team of 200 people to a team of 11 when everything crashed. We then rebuilt the team back to 200 once the market changed. You can imagine how much I learnt about management in that unusual scenario. That’s when I went to business school.
I then joined my former colleague and friend James Brooke who started that tiny startup Amplience, where I’m still today.
In a few words, what is Amplience?
We are a headless CMS that focuses on retail and e-commerce customers. We turn content into data. What we’ve done is abstracting the content as a JSON object and return it in scalable APIs so companies can build any frontend they want.
What are the complexities in building a headless CMS?
Business people need to be able to use it, otherwise it’s useless. It had to be very friendly for less technical people, in an environment where you can preview content when you don’t know where it’s going to go.
It’s complex to preview content at different points in time without knowing the frontend it will be published on. We created a virtual staging environment that allows us to access the content in our backend and deliver it at any point in time. A user can have as many staging environments as needed.
The interface to manage the content was a lot of work to make it user-friendly. We focus on e-commerce and during peaks it can easily triple demand: we must scale for not only the largest customers but every single customer we have. Every millisecond counts in ecommerce. Every second of latency affects the conversion rate. We can generate up to 250,000 dynamic images per second!
I saw you have a YouTube channel: can you tell me more about why you started it, what you offer on it, what is the purpose?
I originally started the channel to educate the rest of the people in the business, it was mostly private at the time. Some of the videos were useful for outside, and we started to get new equipment like professional cameras.
I realised so many concepts like headless, decoupled, etc. can help anyone in the technology world. Helping people understand what they are and why they should care about them.
How do you compare developers who learnt at university with developers who didn’t?
It’s a good question because I think that in the past, the only real root to get in the engineering roles was only through university. Some people managed without, but it was more by luck than design.
Now we’re in the position where our industry is struggling to have enough resources to do what we do, especially in the West. Especially for mid and senior levels. There are now new ways to get talents, even without university. Bootcamps of people who were like I was when I started can provide a good source of talent: giving guidance and structure so they can grow their careers.
We work with both universities and bootcamps to nurture talent.
How do you take people who are skilled and very passionate about technology but miss some of the Computer Science background?
They have more practical capacities, so the goal is to empower them and give them the tools to get that background.
It seems that everyone believes the only job in IT is developer but it isn’t: there are a wide set of jobs in our industry such as QA, Business Analyst, Product Owner, Product Manager. Even support engineering is very different from developer and is a very important role. QA people in the UK are especially hard to find: they need to be good testers with real programming knowledge. Too many people fall into these roles by luck rather than having a path for them.
If you want to connect with John, click here.
To learn more about Amplience, visit their website: amplience.com
To view his YouTube channel, click here
If you’re a techie working on something exciting or you simply want to have a chat, get in touch with me. I’m currently CTO at Kolleno.com
