Rebel Astronaut

Co-Founder

Featurespace

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

DOPS  DIGITAL

Consulting as the Director of the DXOne program for the London Stock Exchange Group.

- Delivered a Developer Platform (DXOne) that would provide a single experience across the whole Org (12k technologists).
- Ran a program with ~50 engineers, architects and BAs.
- DXOne was the first program to successfully deliver their transformation objectives on time, since the merger with Refinitiv.
- Reduced time from idea to market on average by 67% for Lines of Business.
- Delivered an analytics platform to ensure CIOs and their reports get visibility on their areas.
- Designed and Implemented a new operating model to break down the flow of work across teams.
- Designed a community engagement model that was elevated to become the standard for all developer focused comms.
- Liased with Regulators to ensure that changes were approved to the same level as nuclear power plants. 
- Presented and sold the vision of DXOne to numerous CIOs, Heads of Department and Developers.

Principal Transformation Consultant

- Won the company wide ‘Raising the Bar’ award for innovation. 
- Designed and implemented new operating model in a department of 150 employees, driving a more product focused approach.
- Implemented Agile processes in 5 teams to increase velocity by over 100%.
- Owned and implemented the roadmap for IG’s new platform, based on kubernetes.
- Increased resilience for platform by 50% through repeated testing and iteration.
- Designed engagement model for onboarding new teams to the platform.
- Evangelised new platform and created excitement and momentum around the initiative.

Technical Architect - Platform

Contino

- Provided security assurance for FTSE 250  enterprise.
- Enabled Transformation to go live with a goal to double profit within 2 years.
- Developed a “Security First” Culture within the org. 
- Built in-house security team and empowered them to set their own agenda.
- Compiled a report of recomendations for the C-Suite to empower their transformation.
- Developed the consultancy’s internal security practices.

Principal Consultant

Pearson

- Designed and built a platform to support 600+ developers
- Leading architectural decision making and being the voice of security within the team.
- Leading a team of 20 DevOps engineers, training where needed and ensuring the team’s
velocity steadily improved.
- Decreased application onboarding from 3 months to 1 week.
- Decreased overhead for application teams reducing or removing non business workloads to
enable them to decrease cycle time.
- Designed and deployed an automated detection and remediation system within all Pearson AWS
accounts (~200) reducing risks by up to 80%.
- Worked with stakeholders to define account strategy for whole of Pearson.
- Implemented regular vulnerability scanning and remediation for both containers and AMI’s.
- Spearheaded migration to improved CI infrastructure, reducing run times by over 50% and
increasing stability by 30%.
- Implemented Incident response and reporting precedure and ran weekly drills, resolving
incidents 50% faster than before implemented.
- Redesigned kubernetes control plane to support multi-master and regular deploys.
- Responsible for defining and creating a contract between DevOps teams and application teams
to be able to deliver 99.999% uptime to their applications and reduce friction between teams.
- Decreased cost by 200% within development environments, by utilising automated cleanup,
elastic scaling and simplifying the architecture.

DevSecOps Lead/Architect

UK Home Office

- Leading a team of 20 within to deliver a platform supporting 300+ developers.
- Working within highly secure environment empowering critical national infrastructure.
- Implement Vault/Consul workflow for secrets and certificate management.
- Design/Implement the ability update AMI’s without data loss or downtime.
- Standardise engineering practices to increase stability across the whole environment.
- Educate security teams around the differences between cloud infrastructure and on prem.
- Work with team leads to promote containerisation within the team.
- Built out splunk for security monitoring of environments.

Lead Devops/Security Consultant

PhotoBox

- Responsible for taking a dysfunctional team with no leader and low velocity, motivating them,
clarified working procedure and increased velocity by over 100%.
- Designed new kubernetes cluster based around kops for Photobox to migrate all legacy systems
onto.
- Began work on constructing full feature monitoring and security systems.
- Worked closely with the SOC team to manage the security risks and implementing fixes,
including basic secrets management system, and cloudformation creation pipeline.
- Worked with development teams to enable them to manage their own pipelines securely within
Jenkins framework.
- Took stability from 60% uptime in the first month, over all environments, to 100% uptime in the
last.
- Liased with development leads and managers, to ensure that all goals were aligned.
- Implemented agile, to ensure that the workload was measurable, and changes were data-
driven.
- Descreased cycle time by over 40% development teams, allowing features to get shipped faster
and more frequently.

Lead Devops Consultant

- Built and Managed multiple kubernetes clusters as PAAS’ for all Home Office Digital Projects, ie.
- Consulted on the migration of highly sensitive projects onto kubernetes.
- Audited projects on security and worked with apps that were deemed vulnerable to remediate
those threats.
- Built and managed monitoring platform based on Sysdig running on premise on kubernetes and
monitoring over 200 nodes across 3 different cloud providers.
- Built and extended multiple tools to allow teams to avoid reuse of work and ensure time to
production was as low as possible.
- Worked with Neo4j to spearhead their approach to kubernetes and ensure they were able to
support it.
- Worked to ensure all users of the PAAS were able to utilise its self service offering.
- Built relationships within numerous areas within the Home Office to ensure that getting things
done was as easy as possible.
- Supported teams with running kubernetess on bare metal using PXE-boot technology.
- Interviewed and hired multiple other DevOps engineers to build the team from 5 to 15.
- Main point of contact for developers, evangelising best practices and training, both on and
individual and team level.
- Reduced onboarding time from 1 month to 1 day, through automation.
- Increased the number of development teams utilising the platform from ~10, to ~50 over a 6
month period.
- Implemented chargeback system to ensure that all costs were being allocated to respective
development teams, and ensured they still saw at least a 40% reduction in cost.

Senior Devops Engineer

Style.com

- Designed and built Kubernetes platform on AWS
- Adapted scala application to run in a scalable manner, broke application into microservices.
- Designed ci pipeline to deploy code within 5 mins of git commit.
- Dockerised and redesigned application to run on docker, be fault tolerant and scale limitlessly.
- Worked to design a tolerant solution for running Datomic on kubernetes without losing state on pod restart.

Giles is a co-founder of Rebel Astronaut, a startup that aims to make companies more dynamic, flexible, and profitable by speeding up the time from idea to product release. He is also a principal site reliability engineer at Featurespace, a leading provider of adaptive behavioral analytics and fraud detection solutions. 

With over 8 years of experience in DevOps, security, and cloud computing, he has successfully delivered and implemented multiple transformation projects for various organizations, such as the London Stock Exchange Group, Pearson, and the UK Home Office. He has extensive knowledge and skills in infrastructure as code, Amazon Web Services, and DevSecOps methodologies. He is passionate about helping companies achieve their goals by increasing their security, efficiency, and agility.

Giles Hinchcliff

CEO at Idealogic.Design

Seasoned professional in UI/UX and Product Design with over 10 years of experience, specializing in crafting intuitive user experiences and innovative product solutions. Experienced across diverse industries including Fintech, Blockchain, Aviation, Social Media, AI, Real Estate, and Education, delivering impactful, user-centered designs. 

Skilled in solving complex challenges with strategic design thinking, enhancing user satisfaction, and driving business growth. A proactive and adaptable approach is emphasized, focusing on comprehensive problem-solving and service design. 

Extensive industry knowledge and attention to metrics contribute to organizational success, ensuring that every design project not only meets but exceeds expectations. As a Senior Product Designer, UX/UI insights are integrated with strategic business goals to deliver high-quality, impactful products, continuously improving design delivery and maintenance for users.

Viktor Zhytomyrskyi

One of my favorite parts of designing interfaces is when the correct solution feels… a bit illegal 😅

Because if you follow pure “logic”, you end up with UIs that look clean on paper… and fail the second a real person touches them.

Hover hints are a perfect example. If they appear instantly, they become clutter. If they wait a beat, they become information.

So you add a tiny delay. Slightly less “responsive”. Way more humane.
Same story with menus + submenus. The “logical” version says: hover changes the moment your cursor leaves the item.

But humans don’t move in straight lines. They move diagonally. They hesitate. They overshoot.

So you add an invisible safe zone that “forgives” the path to the submenu. It looks out of logic. And it feels amazing.

When you design submenus, do you go with (A) hover+intent, (B) click-to-open, or (C) both, depending on density?

The original idea is by Siyam Afroz from this Linkedin post -  https://lnkd.in/gSu6zDPY

#uxdesign #productdesign #interactiondesign #uidesign #menu #submenu #uxui #userexperience

Senior Product Designer | UI/UX Designer | UX Researcher @ HP

The name “edge case” is kind of misleading. Because for a lot of users, those are normal cases.

They skip steps. 
They tap too fast. 
They close the app and come back.
They’re on an old device. 
Their Wi-Fi is dying. 
The data is messy.

And in production, it goes from “very nice” to “why are people stuck here?” real fast.

I don’t even think edge cases are “extra work” anymore. They are the work. Because users don’t remember the moment when everything went right. They remember the moment when things went weird… and the UI either helped them or abandoned them.

Do you have a “we didn’t think of that” edge case story?

#UXDesign #UIDesign #ProductDesign #UserExperience #EdgeCases #InteractionDesign #Usability #UXResearch

One of my favorite UI feelings is when you don’t have to look - like volume buttons, or a good swipe-back gesture. A good radial menu hits that same nerve. You’re choosing by direction, not by reading.

And that matters because reading is slow. Attention is expensive, especially on a phone. That’s why I think radial menus belong in normal interfaces more than we admit - they’re perfect for those “I know what I want, just let me do it” moments.

Whenever you’re using one hand, on the move, or half-distracted, lists feel heavy. A small wheel feels like a shortcut that shows up right where you already are.

Meetings are a perfect example: mute, camera, share, react. You shouldn’t have to open a panel to do any of that. Same with photo cleanup (favorite, delete, move, share) and docs (comment, highlight, copy, link).

If you keep the wheel small and consistent, it becomes almost eyes-free. Your hand learns the map and stops asking your brain for permission. A few details make it feel premium too: big hit areas, a tiny haptic “tick” as you move between actions, and a soft first-time hint so people discover it - then it disappears.

I’m not saying every menu should be a circle. But for those 4–8 high-frequency actions, radial feels like the shortest path from intent to action.

Do you keep “delete” on the first wheel, hide it behind a second step, or ban it from the wheel completely?

#ProductDesign #UXDesign #InteractionDesign #MobileDesign #UXPatterns #MicroInteractions #UserExperience #InterfaceDesign

Why the best UX feels like something you’ve used before (even when it’s new)

The secret to a "killer feature" is often just reducing the friction of discovery.

By merging two familiar patterns into one seamless flow, you bypass the "learning curve" entirely. Users already know how to scan a list; they already know how to watch a story. By putting them in the same space, you create a high-value interaction without the cognitive tax of a new UI. For us as designers, the goal shouldn't always be "unique" - it should be "effortlessly familiar."

By https://lnkd.in/g5eDk7Di 

#UIUX #ProductDesign #UserExperience #ProductInnovation #DesignThinking

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