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

I’m a Software Engineering Manager and coach with 24+ years of experience building and leading high-performing software engineering teams. My unique focus blends engineering leadership with a deep commitment to mindset, wellbeing, and sustainable performance.I’ve coached software engineers and leaders on leadership, mindset, and wellbeing and have spoken and delivered workshops at international conferences on these themes. My aim is to shape engineering culture at scale and raise the bar for how we support our teams to grow and thrive.Whether leading teams, mentoring individuals, or building automation tools and scalable systems, I believe that small, intentional habits—at both the individual and team levels—compound into extraordinary impact.

Richard Donovan

BAE Systems

* Tried another big software engineering consultancy, but realised that the setting just was 'not for me'.
* Wrote a comprehensive 'whole team' software quality strategy designed to reduce defects and increase product quality.
* Spoke very honestly and passionately about software quality and championed 'doing the right thing'.

Senior Quality Engineer

* Completed the majority of study for the AWS Solutions Architect - Associate certification.
* Mentored a junior engineer.
* Decided it definitely wasn't the right fit for me, and handed in my notice.

Leading DevOps/Software Engineer

* Beat cancer.
* Worked on open source and hobby projects (see projects below)
* Got fitter and healthier by doing a lot of exercise and adopting better habits.

Sabbatical

Kaboodle

DevOps Senior Software engineer in the music industry working on gig and club ticketing solutions.

Expanding my knowledge on Docker, Docker Compose, GCP, Bash and Jenkins.

Senior DevOps Automation Engineer

Carbon Co-op

•	Worked on software development for a React.js / Node.js application as a contractor.
•	Learned a lot about React and Node.js software development.

Software Engineer

Exploratory and automated Agile testing of a complex accounting system that pays the stars of ITV. This has included acquiring in-depth and detailed product and technical knowledge of a large 5 year old system written in Java, MySQL, JavaScript and using microservices on AWS using Docker and Kubanates, writing some automated testing in Java and test tools in Python, and often being the only tester on the team for this, so processing large numbers of test tickets in a detailed, thorough and efficient way. One mistake could cost ITV hundreds of thousands of pounds which may not be able to be reclaimed,  so accuracy is crucial.

Working in the Quality Engineering team for the ARM Manchester office. A 'Quality Engineer' at Arm is a combination of DevOps around CI servers, exploratory testing and test automation. Duties include: deciding on a strategy around automated testing for the ARM HPC compiler, use of Ansible and Docker to maintain and deploy containers onto machines, CI server pipeline setup, support and administration using GoCD and Jenkins, test automation using the Robot framework, development in Python and Bash, exploratory testing the compiler and associated libraries using C++ and Fortran snippets, and getting up to speed on the background and academic material surrounding writing compilers.

Senior DevOps Engineer

Most recently I was writing automated testing systems for testing of Smart TVs in node.js/Jasmine.

I have also worked on a Ruby/Rails/Cucumber/Appium web application product, hosted in AWS, that distributes applications such as the mobile version of BBC iPlayer to a variety of test devices, runs test suites developed by the BBC's testers on them, and shows the resultant build quality metrics in an analytics panel. I am also working on a live monitoring service that provides analytics, alerts and quality metrics for monitoring the current state of iPlayer on Smart TVs and mobile devices.

During this time I also worked on a 6 month attachment as Senior Software Engineer in BBC R&D, building a HTML5 javascript web-based spatial audio platform for binaural research, and audience listening.

Senior Software/Developer Tooling Engineer

Managing and leading a team of Software Engineers to drive test automation of the BBC's online platform that powers iPlayer, amongst other services. This team is embedded in the 'Platform API' department of Platform, Digital division.

Lead Software Engineer

At the BBC I work as a Senior Software Engineer, in the Television and Mobile Platforms department in the Future Media division of the organisation. Work has included:

* Taking the lead role in building a system to automate mobile device testing. This has involved development in Ruby/Rspec/Cucumber/Rails/Bash on a virtualised Linux stack. In our team we also use Amazon Web Services EC2 instances on the new BBC infrastructure platform, which involves building deployments using Amazon CloudFront. We interact with the mobile and tablet devices using Calabash.

* Developing high volume web applications using Java/Spring/Tomcat on a CentOS platform, using Behaviour Driven Development with acceptance tests written Ruby/Cucumber, and Test Driven Development with unit tests in JUnit and Mockito.

* Working at the broadcast end of the BBC's architecture, maintaining and supporting the uptime of systems which serve up content that is delivered on live BBC TV. I've patched these systems in Java, Perl and MHEG, and done a lot of work reconfiguring applications and Tomcat/JBOSS deployments, setting up CentOS servers and support work.

I've undertaken these projects in an Agile/Scrum environment, often pair programming with other team members to solve problems.

Senior Software Engineer

Freelance

I have worked as a freelance web consultant for several years. Recent projects included: 

* Web application bug-fixing on a high availability content management system with hundreds of live sites. PHP/MySQL development of this system, and Linux server administration tasks. 
 
* Extensive Wordpress customisation for an extreme sports company. Installing and configuring WP, writing extensions in PHP, integrating a legacy CMS, setting up dozens of users, making sure the system scaled. 
 
* Linux server setup and administration for a small web development firm. Installing and configuring subversion, PHP, MySQL, Apache web server with extensions, DNS server, virtual hosts configuration, and setting up an offsite backup system.

IT Freelancer

RDF Group

At RDF Consulting, I worked as a build engineer on large Java-based software teams: 

* In my main role I built from source, deployed and delivered versions of a large Java project for a major UK bank, administered and configured source-control, bug trackers, wikis, and automated nightly builds. 

* I worked as the technical lead in a team that developed a Drupal-based external website for the company. I wrote PHP extensions, installed and configured the development and live web application stacks, wrote backup scripts, mentored junior developers, troubleshooting all 
problems and monitored and maintained the live Linux webserver.

Build & Configuration Administrator

I am a very experienced (20 years) very technical Principal Software/DevOps Engineer, pushing for a career change into red team cyber security/pentesting. I am NOT currently interested in any full-time work that is not cyber-security related.

I am currently studying a Cyber Security MSc at the prestigious Royal Holoway college at the University of London, while looking for an entry-level cybersecurity 'red team'/pentester role, and am aggressively upskilling in this area, see: https://davidcraddock.net/security-research/

Recent experience has included DevOps/CI/SDET work for CGI, Arm and the BBC.

I am a life-long learner, I have a BSc(Hons) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence degree from the University of Sussex, and in addtion to that, I have completed many undergraduate level and graduate level modules in a number of different subjects (including music).

I am sometimes available for freelance part-time career tutoring/computing tutoring/freelance development/IT. If you are interested in that area, please see: https://davidcraddocktutor.com/

I read a lot. I have a large, varied, library at home. Some of the books I've been reading are here: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/22437975-david

Do feel free to reach out about anything. Please message me on LinkedIn firstly, I do not like unexpected calls. It is unlikely I will consider any role unless it is 100% WFH at the moment, but not impossible.

What I write here in no way represents the beliefs and opinions of current or former employers.

taplio

The Battle

Richard Donovan

👾David Craddock

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