I have now been a Software Engineering Team Lead on the BBC Sounds mobile apps team for 4 years. So what have I learned from this once-daunting, now-familiar role? Leadership does not mean telling people what to do. Mother Goose is holding back here and letting the baby gosling stride confidently ahead Before working at the BBC, I thought a tech lead’s job was to think of some work to do and command others to do it. It was quite a damaging misconception, because it stopped me considering moving up from a software engineer into management. I don’t like telling people what to do. This ..read more

At the start of the year I took up a job as Head of Delivery for BBC Product Group as part of a new cross discipline leadership team led by our CPO Storm Fagan. It’s my job to help the BBC get the most out of modern digital agile ways of working. Bringing more product thinking to how we work by focussing on outcomes and putting user needs at the heart of what we do. Much of my role is helping teams collaborate effectively together at scale. Product Group is over 100 teams and we work with many more teams in editorial, marketing and across the BBC. We are responsible for products like ..read more

How I learned to manipulate JSON data with Pandas on a Jupyter Notebook and deconstruct it to a DataFrame ready for queries. Image by author created from Jupiter photo by NASA and Pandas photo by Pascal Müller on UnsplashA bit of context first I started a self-study path to learn the theoretical fundamentals of Data Science and Machine Learning. I have also been playing with Python ever since, with coding exercises during the “Friday 10% time” here at the BBC and on my own time when I have some to spare. I created this playground repository to refresh my Pythonic knowledge ..read more

Photo by Sen on Unsplash Modern JavaScript websites are the result of complex code bases, and the code base which powers BBC Online is no exception. There are many dependencies and frameworks that we rely upon in order to provide the functionality that our end-users expect, as well as code written in-house to cater to the needs of our website and its users; being able to click a button to follow a topic, search for content and play videos all require JavaScript code to be run by the browser. For a website as large and with as many seemingly disparate needs as the BBC’s various pages ..read more

BBC Online — A year with serverless Its been a little over a year since I published my last two blog posts, in which I outlined the process we went through to choose the technology for BBC online and the steps we took to optimise serverless for our use. Recently my colleague Graeme has published a blog post on the organisational challenges we’ve faced in delivering this project. The BBC’s Office in MediaCity, Salford — one of many bases that the BBC’s Software Engineering teams are located. In this post I reflect on our progress so far, and some of the interesting challenges we are f ..read more

Changing the organisation — to build the technology right. In earlier blog posts, we explored how we moved BBC online to the cloud. This was part of a wider initiative called WebCore, which used a range of serverless technologies to reimagine the BBC website. There were technical challenges we faced integrating WebCore with our architecture, but this initiative has been as much a refactor of our organisation, with profound implications on the people within it. In this blog post, rather than focus just on the technical challenges, I want to share: Some of the organisational history t ..read more

That’s a bold statement I know, but let me explain exactly why I believe this is true, and why I’m so passionate about it. The BBC which is celebrating its centenary this year is like no other organisation in the world. Our job is simple, to ensure that it remains just as relevant in the future as it has been in the past. More specifically in software engineering, our vision is for the BBC to be as renowned for its engineering as it is for its content. For that, we have to further develop the idea of the BBC as a product and technology company. Imagine working in a team that develops and runs ..read more

Much like Sir David Attenborough I was not successful on my first application to the BBC , however I was not dissuaded and applied again! Fortunately, I was successful last year and have joined the BBC as Senior Product Manager — Children’s Apps. CBeebies Playtime Island app icon On my first day all the team were very welcoming and friendly, and have explained (and continue to explain!) every BBC acronym very patiently. As a new Product person, it’s often intimidating to join a new organisation, not to mention within a new domain. As I have joined during the COVID-19 Omicron wave, ev ..read more

Hackathons, innovation days, codefests — whatever you call them — have been a feature of the tech industry for the last 20 years, and one of the most powerful ideation tools at our disposal. The premise is simple, given a theme or problem space, the hackathon participants must self-organise into teams to explore ideas, write some code, and deliver a working prototype or demo in a ridiculously short period of time. In my time at the BBC I’ve taken part in many different flavours of hack — from large multi-department events, collaborations with other organisations, 24-hour hacks, week long ..read more

Scaling: Part 3 — Minimising scaling headaches In part one of this blog trilogy we introduced some scaling terminology, and in part two we looked at if it’s worth scaling your system at all, how delays in scaling can make it difficult to respond to sudden spikes of user traffic, how caching can reduce the amount you need to scale, and we touched on using managed services to let someone else take the reins on dealing with scaling. In this final part we’re going to look at how structuring our systems to use an asynchronous static publishing approach to help us minimise our scaling headaches. Wha ..read more