I don’t just attend communities – I build them. The thread running through my career is that technology adoption happens through people, not mandates. The Mobile Community of Practice I co-chaired at Barclays saved over £1m through cross-BU asset sharing. User groups I co-organise regularly hit 40+ attendees. Hack events I’ve run have reached 115+ participants in a single day.
For the full speaking and events list, see Speaking & Events.
Community Organiser Roles
GDG Cloud North West (Manchester)
Co-organiser, 2024 – present
I’m the primary organiser for GDG Cloud North West (Manchester), running multiple events per year with 40-45 person attendance. Topics range from AI and Cloud Run to WASM and prompt engineering. In June 2025 I attended the GDG Community Summit in Berlin as a community organiser – which led directly to the London Build with AI dual event in October.
AWS Liverpool User Group
Co-organiser, 2019 – present
I helped revive a dormant user group and have organised 25+ sessions since. We’ve grown to 20-45 people per session with a 4.8/5 rating from 119 ratings. Events include re:Invent recaps, observability workshops, and Amazon Q challenges.
Mentoring & People Development
At LBG
- Mentored 2 engineers to promotion into Principal Engineer roles (in other teams – the best kind of mentoring outcome)
- Proactively brought graduates and apprentices into the team, with one graduate transitioning to a permanent role
Barclays Rise Accelerator
Mentored fintech startups through Barclays’ global fintech accelerator programme – advising on API strategy and helping startups navigate the gap between startup pace and enterprise governance.
Cambridge Judge Business School
Client sponsor for an MPhil consultancy project on high-performance engineering in the age of AI. We set the challenge – what’s actually slowing down delivery at pace inside a large bank? – then worked with the students throughout, pointing them towards the right research areas and shaping their thinking as they built out their findings and recommendations. The project placed 3rd in cohort.
Awards & Recognition
| Award | Context |
|---|---|
| Engineering Community Connector Award (A.C.E Ambassadors, 2025) | Group-level LBG award from CTO Skills & Community leadership – for breaking silos and building engineering communities |
| CIO Enabling Sustainability Hero (H1 2025) | CIO-level award for connecting serverless technology to ESG/sustainability objectives |
| Engineering Learning Ambassador (LBG) | Group award for role-modelling learning and sharing |
Communities of Practice (Barclays era)
| Community | Role | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| REST API Community of Practice | Chair | Delivered group-wide REST standards; API training for 350+ engineers |
| Mobile Community of Practice | Co-chair | £1m+ savings through cross-BU asset sharing |