About me

I have been building things on the web since the mid-1990s — starting with hand-rolled HTML in a university computer lab, and ending up (so far) as VP Product Engineering & Architecture at Deltatre, where I provide technical leadership, create engineering alignment, and deliver software at scale.

Along the way I have worked at agencies you might have heard of, co-founded a start-up, helped re-shape organisations that had stopped working, and shipped things for clients like Goldman Sachs, Google, Aston Martin, and the London 2012 Olympics.

You can read more about some of those roles and the projects I've led in my career timeline.

I still look mostly like this photo (from 2018-ish), but a little bit older and much more tired.

What I do​

I spend most of my time thinking about how engineering teams and organisations actually work, particularly as the pace of delivery increases.

That means thinking less about the technology and more about the harder problems — how you build the conditions in which good engineering can actually happen.

Things I am thinking about​

I wanted a way to bring together some of the more specific things that I am currently thinking about which might otherwise get lost in the rolling content of the blog — assuming I remember to post more often, that is — so I put the Thinking section together.

My blog​

Talking of my blog, it pulls together some of the highly assorted thoughts and blog-type things I have put online via various tools and platforms over many years — I have tracked down some stuff back to 2009 so far — with varying degrees of success and/or longevity.

I've been putting my thoughts out there for people to (dis?)agree with for some time now, albeit with no kind of predictable cadence.

So this is where I collect things that don't sit — or fit — anywhere else.

It is deliberately very simple, because for me it's more about putting something out there rather than doing something fancy.

Getting in touch with me​

If anything here resonates with you — or if you want to disagree with something I have written — I'm easiest to find on LinkedIn or you can reach me by email at hello@andyhawkes.co.uk.

I used to be quite active on Twitter but have dumped that (for obvious reasons).

Caveats​

All opinions are my own (or shamelessly stolen).

All em-dashes are my own too (Shift + Alt + - for Mac users), because I read Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style¹many years ago and have been using them since before they became a tell-tale sign of AI intervention.

This version of my site is built using Docusaurus, because it's quick and easy, so don't come at me with your shiny new frameworks and whatnot. I remember browsing the web (such as it was) via a green-screen terminal at university using Lynx as my browser, and am a certified veteran of the Browser Wars, so this will do just fine for me (for now).