After three years coaching engineers and leaders on mindset and wellbeing, I’m now combining that experience with my deep software engineering background as a Software Engineering Manager at OVO Energy.

Our work empowers customers to transition to greener energy by guiding them through the process of selecting and installing EV chargers. With ChargeAnytime, they benefit from cheaper, smarter charging, and through partnerships with industry leaders like Volvo and VWG, we extend this even further—offering new EV owners thousands of free miles alongside ongoing cost savings on their EV charging.

I work closely with my head of engineering to help shape our engineering strategy and model architecture. Through continuous improvement and a strong engineering culture, we continue to move toward our vision.

I’ve grown my fully remote team from four to ten engineers. This involved hiring and onboarding top talent and ensuring the right balance of technical expertise, mindset, and collaboration. 

I employ strategies such as dysfunction mapping to highlight areas for improvement within my teams. We also hold weekly continuous improvement sessions to provide feedback, engage team members, and track progress toward our technical and behavioural goals.

I focus on a coaching approach for my engineers, encourage taking responsibility and insist on fostering a psychologically safe environment were we can give and receive feedback, talk about mistakes and learn from them without the blame and judgement.

I work closely with nearshore partners, seamlessly integrating them into our work processes to extend our capabilities.

I recently represented OVO at Volvo’s Stockholm HQ, taking part in a two-day kickoff workshop for a multi-business collaboration project.

Contributed to ISO acreditation process for ChargeAnytime.

Software Engineering Manager

RD Coached Ltd

As the director of RD Coached Ltd, I provide mindset workshops and talks to software development teams and I provide 1-2-1 coaching to software developers and software development leaders.

Delivered a 2-hour workshop and delivered a talk on the main track at the C3 Dev Festival 2024 held in Amsterdam and the TechLead Conference 2024.

I also provide software development consultancy services via outside IR35 Contracts.

As part of my role, I continue to build automation systems to streamline my business, including integrating Notion and LinkedIn to save time scheduling and posting social media content.

I've also built a wellbeing hub for software developers and leaders with tools to help with mental and physical wellbeing. One of my tools integrates with the OpenAI Api.

Key technical skills:
C# Net 7, .Net Core, EF, ASP.NET, MVC, WebAPI, Microservices, HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns, Azure DevOps, Azure Services, Docker, SCRUM, Agile, Apps Script, SQL Server, coaching, training, speaking

Director

Mindspan

As a Peak Performance Mindset Coach, I delivered Talks, Workshops and 1-2-1 coaching based on Mindspan's Peak Performance Mind Programme.

Peak Performance Mindeset Coach

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) 

During my time with BEIS, I wrote a support application in React to streamline queries from the Government's Help To Grow programme, often reducing the effort from hours to minutes.

I saved the department nearly £20k by reviewing their caching strategy of the main Help to Grow system and providing feedback.

I later moved to the initial stages of the government's Energy Support scheme, in which I communicated with cross-functional teams to solidify the team's understanding of requirements as well as guided those less technical teams on the art of the possible, given the requirements and the time pressures we were under.

I onboarded and mentored new team members and took an active role in ensuring everyone had a voice in our meetings.

Senior Software Engineer

Aviva

Technical:
As part of a small team of software architects, I was responsible for overseeing the work of up to 200 developers who delivered our suite of digital online applications globally. 

I introduced consistent patterns and practices to ensure efficient and consistent development across our teams. 

I defined and implemented coding standards, peer reviews and integrated new technologies into the ecosystem.

Key projects include:
Migration to .NET Core and a containerized, cloud-based architecture.

Migration of our source control and build system from Atlassian Stash and Jenkins to Microsoft Azure DevOps, introducing comprehensive CI/CD processes

Developed and maintained a microservice-based API layer using .Net Core 3.1/Net 5.

Full re-write of a legacy payment application into .NET Core 3.1.

Key Skills:
C# Net 5, .Net Core, ASP.NET, MVC, HTML, CSS, Accessibility, Javascript, JQuery, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns, Azure DevOps, Docker, SCRUM, Agile

Thoughts:
I recognised the struggles I'd had during my career, in the developers I worked with, and started to think in terms of positively impacting those around me.

I realised that mindset and mental health were being overlooked, and companies didn't seem to be aware of the specific challenges developers face on a daily basis. 

I wanted to change this. It started with the impact that technical decisions could have and later moved into a focus on mindset, wellbeing and engineering excellence.

Software Architect

Technical:
Many developers and BAs were just starting an agile transformation and struggled to grasp the benefits. 

By building trust and showing rather than telling, I brought them along on our agile journey.

A big turning point was gaining the trust of the Product Owner, who had been very sceptical under the previous leadership. 

The team was growing fast, which meant I had to improve at delegating and trusting my team, too.

With so many engineering teams across the organisation, communication was a struggle. 

To improve the situation, I arranged a bi-weekly meeting for team leads to discuss upcoming work and share technical best practices or concerns.

The result was improved communication and collaboration across teams, better reuse of code and designs, a more consistent code base, and improved knowledge sharing.

Key skills
C#, ASP.NET MVC, JQuery, HTML, CSS, Accessibility, SQL Server 2012, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns, TDD, Moq, LINQ, Structure Map, BDD, Selenium, SCRUM, Agile, Javascript, Knockout, CSS

Thoughts:
Having recently been made redundant, I struggled with my self-belief and confidence when I started this role. I felt like I bundled my way through the interview, and when I actually started my role, I had massive feelings of imposter syndrome. 

I doubled down on areas of mindset and mental health to improve self-belief and confidence. Very quickly I was leading by example and driving the team to the successful completion of two major projects.

Team Lead

BGO Studios

Technical:
As a Senior Software Engineer at BGO Studios, I was the lead server developer on the Remote Gaming Server (RGS) project.  

The team: 3 server-side developers, 2 mathematicians and 4 front end developers based in London. 

My responsibilities:
• Design and implement the Remote Gaming Server roadmap
• Report project status to senior management 
• Distribution of development tasks 
• Interpret complex math models and create server-side implementation
• Integrate with an admin system to view spin data
• Create simulation programs to spin the slot machine up to 500 million times to generate statistics 
• Liaise with internal and external QA teams
• Expose a REST API to be consumed by Flash/HTML5 client
• Consume REST services of gambling platform to provide user account and wallet facilities.

Games released to live::
•	Jurassic Island 
•	Jungle Trouble 
•	Satsumos Revenge 
•	Murder Mystery 
•	Aladdin and The Wild Genie
•	Jekyll & Hyde 

* Slots engine was subsequently sold.

Key skills
HTML, CSS, C#, ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server 2014, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns, DDD, SOA, WCF Services (REST/Soap), Test Driven Development, Rhino Mocks, LINQ, Structure Map

Thoughts:
In this role, I was once again tested from a mental strength and mindset perspective. It was both very stressful and extremely technical. I key part of dealing with the pressure and stress of this role was prioritising my physical health and really leaning on my mindset.

This helped me massively in dealing with what started out as some quite challenging relationships. I gained a great appreciation for the importance of relationships in work and also in my personal life.

Proteo

Technical:
I was responsible for delivering the product road map, defining product architecture and the functional design of new product capabilities. 

I produced technical specifications, development estimates and participated in implementation, overseeing the work of the team. 

Key skills included object-oriented design, asynchronous programming, design patterns and database design. 

I also got involved in pre-sales by providing product demonstrations to potential new clients.

Key skills
C#, ASP.NET Webforms/MVC, JQuery, SQL Server 2012, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns, SOA, WCF Services (REST/Soap), Entity Framework, LINQ, Bing Maps/Virtual Earth, Active Reports.NET, Telerik controls and reporting, Silverlight, MVVM, JavaScript

Thoughts:
I was the  Team Lead/Architect of the Proteo product development team. 

This was the first time I had led a team and I really started to see the importance of patience, support and the massive significance of mindset and mental health. 

This was both from my own perspective and from the perspective of my team members too. 

Leaning on my mentors, I started to develop my leadership style but more importantly, I started to develop my self-belief, confidence and communication skills.

Team Lead / Architect

Tournament.com

Technical:
Tournament.com was an online gaming site where customers paid to compete and potentially win money based on their performance in the game. 

As a software engineer, I was responsible for the full development life cycle of the Tournament.com client, a downloadable windows forms application. The purpose of the application was to register and launch third party games. It also provided a wealth of information to customers about services available including promotions, offers and tournaments. It allowed users to chat and join scheduled tournaments for their chosen game.  My key responsibilities were:

Producing technical specifications for the Tournament.com client.
Designing and implementing a multi-threaded application.
Usage of design patterns.
Usage of object oriented design to streamline the application code and ensure that it was concise and maintainable.
Release management.

Key skills 
C#, Winforms, ASP.NET, SQL Server, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns, Multi-threading

Thoughts:
This role turned out to be a technically challenging and high pressure job. I learnt a lot about how not to achieve work/life balance. Luckily, the work was really interesting and the people were good fun.

Software Engineer

Homeserve

Reward Scheme project

Key skills 
VB.NET, Winforms, ASP.NET, SQL Server, OO design, SOLID principals, Design patterns

The aim of this project was to motivate engineers to reduce remedial call outs by awarding\deducting points which translated into a regular bonus. This saved the company significant costs and increased productivity in 75% of the depots up and down the country. Key aspects of my role were:

Object orientated programming, n-tier architecture.
Adhering to strict coding standards, participating in peer code reviews.
Transformation of functional requirement documents into technical specifications and designs.
Accurate time keeping as all time was logged to monitor costs of different projects.
Communicating effectively with depot users, other developers and senior management.
To provide regular statistical analysis of the performance of all aspects of the job tracking system.

IT Systems Developer

💚 Helping Developers & Leaders Balance Wellbeing and Success 🚀 | Software Developer | Leader | Mindset Coach | Personal Trainer | Mental Health First Aider

With over 24 years of software engineering experience and 3 years spent coaching software engineers and software engineering leaders on their mindset and wellbeing, I'm currently combining this skill set as a Software Engineering Manager.

I aim to positively impact the Software Engineering industry by highlighting the importance of mindset, mental health and wellbeing within high-performing teams.

My ambition is to run the software engineering function for a huge company so that I can shape the culture and ways of working on a large scale and hopefully gain wider traction across the industry.

I've spoken at an international tech conference about the importance of mindset, wellbeing and mental health in the software engineering industry.

In my teams:

I value great communication, collaboration and empathy.

A growth mindset, a positive attitude, and a thirst for continuous improvement are key qualities I look for.

Taking responsibility for our thoughts as well as our actions is extremely important.

I encourage my team to prioritise their wellbeing and their physical and mental health.

We focus on what we CAN do, not what we can't...

We focus on small individual habits...

And small team-level habits...

That compound over time...

The direction of travel is the most important thing. 
Always improving, even by the smallest amount. 
The speed at which we improve can vary massively, but we consistently move in the right direction.

Richard Donovan

Majority of Work

Mentor & Software Engineer

Uplift Agency Ltd.

New Relic

Software Engineer II

Horus Monitoring

• Created Horus, an open-source observability solution for distributed applications
• Created telemetry data pipeline: generating (OpenTelemetry), processing (Express), storing (TimescaleDB) and visualizing (Next.js) metrics and traces
• Prototyped alternative infrastructures using Grafana, Jaeger, Zipkin, and ElasticSearch
• Built Horus Agent: NPM that abstracts the work of using OpenTelemetry SDKs to instrument and export metrics and traces to Horus
• Optimized for higher requests per second using OpenTelemetry queues and batching 
• Designed and load tested with artillery.io, front-end tested with Jest
• Tested Horus infrastructure locally and in a distributed microservice architecture hosted across multiple DigitalOcean VPS
• Automated deployment using Docker (network, images, docker-compose)
• Authored Horus’s case study: https://tryhorus.com/case-study
• Collaborated with a remote team of 4 engineers across 3 timezones using agile workflow

Creator, Software Engineer

A few of the projects & technologies used during this time:
• RequestBin.site - a real-time application for receiving & debugging webhooks (Socket.io, Nginx, Redis, DigitalOcean Droplet, PM2)
• Contact Manager - A CRUD app for storing and filtering contacts (Node.js/Express, PostgreSQL, vanilla JavaScript).
• Ello-Trello - A Trello-like collaboration app(MongoDB, Express, Node, React, Redux, ReactDnD)
• Shopping Cart - a database-backed e-commerce app (React, Redux, MongoDB, Node

Launch School

• Led weekly study groups teaching programming fundamentals, problem-solving, and Ruby Object-Oriented programming
• Provided detailed code reviews on small coding projects
• Created instructional and problem-solving videos for fundamental JavaScript concepts
• Wrote detailed curriculum focusing on the problem-solving process of Ruby and JavaScript coding challenges
• Led and hosted a full season of the community podcast
• Wrote Medium blog posts explaining technical and soft-skill problem-solving

Teaching Assistant

Richmond Academy

- Taught 7-12 grade English courses — made every curriculum adapted to the students. From scratch.
- Conducted hybrid virtual instruction for most classes — half the class was in the room with me, the other half were in a classroom a few hours north
- Created & taught custom Communications course 
- Taught other various courses including Personal Finance, Physical Education.

High School English Teacher

Various

- Created & taught custom ESL course in Dubai for medical professionals
- Substitute taught throughout Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan publics schools
- Assistant taught first grade — heavy focus on writing, reading comprehension & fluency
- Created & taught custom ESL course 1:1 via virtual personal tutoring

English Teacher

Found, planned, and led service projects on the ground. Working with local organizations and individuals, created meaningful opportunities for volunteers to serve. Learned, what seemed to be, every leadership lesson under the sun. 

Service projects included:
- Medical & mental health clinics in various parts of India
- Working within an orphanage & an autism centre in Dubai, UAE
- Serving alongside a growing church in Oklahoma

Service Director

Working with people is hard. 

As a kid, I struggled to make friends.
I was annoying. Talked too much. Didn't listen enough.
Always said the wrong thing.

As an adult, it got way harder. Especially at work.
My boss once cut me off, told me I was being unacceptable. 
I had no idea why. I was just being honest?

These were my default settings.

As an adult, I learned how to work well with others. 
I learned every lesson the hard way. I apologized a lot. 
I read books. I had great mentors. I tried. 
And I grew.

Then I transitioned into software engineering.
During interviews, people kept commenting on my EQ. That my ability to work well with others set me apart. 

I figured they were just being nice.
I feared that my non-traditional background would actually put me behind everyone.
I didn't assemble circuit boards as a kid or tinker with a raspberry pi.
But then I started working as a SWE and felt it: my people skills leveled up my career.

These were my learned settings.

My decade of experience learning soft skills helped me with the majority of my work:
- Being persuasive and empowering others
- Working well with difficult people
- Giving and receiving feedback wisely
- Writing code and docs with others in mind
- Translating vague ideas into clear tickets
- Managing stress with realistic boundaries
- Forging real relationships with colleagues

I fell in love with TypeScript. Became a great debugger. A lover of learning. 

I'm good at tech, sure.
But it's my soft skills that managers, skip-levels, and colleagues come to me for.
It's how, in less than two years, I went from beginner to Senior Software Engineer. 

We think the technical challenges will be the hardest part.
But then that Senior won't answer your questions.
Your manager is too busy for you.
Your teammate ghosts your PR comments.
And you realize: the people part is what makes or breaks your growth.

Having mentored over 100 developers, I've seen it again and again:
It's not just about clean code. It's about clear communication. 
Because the majority of work involves other people.

And just like a coding language, you can learn every single soft skill.

taplio

The Battle

Richard Donovan

Callie Buruchara

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