London Tech Insider

Neil Gibbons
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A show that shines a light on the tech community in London.

  1. 07/18/2022

    #22 Sean Nolan: Blink, the Frontline App

    Blink is a fast-growing startup, founded here in London, and is focused on creating software for companies with a large ‘frontline’ workforce. A frontline worker is essentially one without a desk, so Blink’s end users can be quite diverse, from tree surgeons to bus drivers or from hospital staff to production line workers. Like employees at all companies, these workers need to manage payroll, book shifts, and communicate with their coworkers. Solutions exist to do all this for normal desk workers, but frontline workers are rarely behind a computer and struggle with these tasks using conventional software. Sean realised this problem several years ago and set about building Blink. Now the company has gathered over £20 million in funding and is expanding quickly into international markets.

    43 min

  2. 06/13/2022

    #21 Dimitrios Kofodimos: Nutmeg and the UK Robo-Advisor Market

    In this episode, I spoke to Dimitrios Kofodimos, VP of Growth at Nutmeg. Nutmeg is a key player in the competitive UK online investment management market. We start the episode by outlining exactly what Nutmeg does and understanding the different parts of the service offered by the company. We then moved on to understanding Nutmeg’s competition and what sets them apart. Finally, Dimitrios gave an inside view of Nutmeg’s recent acquisition by JP Morgan.

    48 min

  3. 05/27/2022

    #20 John Spindler: Early-Stage Startup Investing

    This week, I speak to John Spindler. He is the CEO of Capital Enterprise, an organisation supporting start-ups in the UK. He is also a seed investor, funding technology companies while they’re in their infancy to help get them off the ground. In the interview we covered two main topics, an introduction to venture capital and how the London tech scene has evolved over the last decade.

    55 min

  4. 05/19/2022

    #19 Alcor Academy: Socio-Technical Training for Software Teams

    Today I speak to Marco Consolaro and Alex Di Gioia. Together, they run training courses for software engineers as part of their company, Alcor Academy. They are highly experienced software engineers themselves, each of them having around 20 years of experience in the industry. In this time, they independently came to the same conclusions about what leads to effective development teams. When they met at a previous employer, Marco and Alex began coaching other employees and through this process, they came up with many exercises and innovative approaches to teaching. They captured this knowledge in their book called ‘Agile Technical Practices Distilled’. Following on from the book’s success, they now run Alcor Academy to interactively teach the book’s content and more.

    53 min

  5. 05/12/2022

    #18 Katja Mordaunt: the Code Reading Club

    This week I speak to Katja Mordaunt. In her day to day work, she is a freelance web developer, but for today’s episode, we focus on her work starting the Code Reading Club. The club is based on the idea that surprisingly little attention is given to teach developers how to properly read and understand code. The club aims to address this by teaching participants a range of techniques through carefully designed exercises. Katja clearly explains exactly what’s involved in these exercises later in the episode. The idea for Code Reading Club was born when Katja heard Felienne Hermans, a previous guest on this podcast, speak about her book, the Programmer’s brain, so make sure to find that episode too. Find out more about Code Reading Club here: https://codereading.club/

    44 min

  6. 05/05/2022

    #17 Daniel Terhorst-North: how to get the most out of software teams

    This week, I speak to Daniel Terhorst-North. He has had a long career in the world of software and is the source of many influential ideas in this field. For example, a popular process of work for software teams, known as Behaviour-Driven Development, was his brain-child. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and a well-known blogger. These days, he brings all his experience to others through his consulting firm, Dan North and Associates. This episode mostly explores Dan’s views on engineering management and how to get the most out of software teams. https://dannorth.net/

    34 min

  7. 04/28/2022

    #16 Tom Christie: creating the Django Rest Framework and funding open-source projects

    This week I speak to Tom Christie. He is the creator of the Django Rest Framework, a tool which helps software developers write web APIs. The project is extremely popular, with over 1000 individual contributors and 300,000 users. We spend the first part of the episode discussing DRF - it was really interesting to get an insight into the open source world from such a notable contributor. Funding is a very important issue for the open-source community - all major companies depend heavily on open-source projects to operate, but don’t always offer much in return. As a result, open source contributors have to be creative in how they seek funding to keep their projects alive. In Tom’s case, he set up an organisation called Encode, which corporate sponsors pay into to fund his work. This was another interesting topic of discussion for the latter part of our conversation.

    46 min

  8. 04/14/2022

    #15 Neil Campbell: Introduction to the Growth Manager Role

    This week I speak to Neil Campbell about the growth manager role that’s becoming more and more popular in the tech industry. In this position, managers have a deep understanding of both the product and marketing sides of the business, leading to a unique perspective where they understand deeply what brings in customers, and how the product can change to achieve this. Neil recently started as Chief Growth Officer at Smol, a Series B funded, subscription-based eco-cleaning brand. Before this, he worked in a diverse range of roles, including VP of Growth at MoneyBox, so he’s well-qualified to talk about the Growth Manager role! Many of Neil’s previous roles have been with Series B funded startups, so for the last part of the episode, we also speak about what makes these sorts of companies an especially interesting place to work. https://smolproducts.com/

    53 min
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About

A show that shines a light on the tech community in London.

Information

  • Creator
    Neil Gibbons
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2022
  • Episodes
    21
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Neil Gibbons
  • Show Website
    London Tech Insider