Welcome to my blog

Hey there! 👋 I’m James, a Lead Software Engineer at AM, where we create innovative digital resources that empower educators and students alike.

I’ll be sharing my learnings in technology and leadership. I’m always reading some new book about leadership, management or people and I’ll be sharing my thoughts and insights on this site. I’ll also be talking about conferences or anything else that inspires me on my journey in software engineering.

If you’re into tech, leadership, or personal growth then you might find something of interest here.

Cheers,

James

Book highlights - Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by Claire Hughes Johnson

Over the past few months, I’ve been reading Claire Hughes Johnson’s Scaling People book. I recently added this book to my leadership library. It focuses on the strategies and tactics that leaders can apply to build and scale their organisation. In this post, I’ll be covering some of my highlights from the book. This post only covers the surface level. Claire goes into much more detail on all of the below topics in her book, so I would highly recommend you buy a copy for yourself and give it a read. ...

nor(DEV):con 2025 - My Highlights

I attended nor(DEV):con 2025 on Thursday 27th and Friday 28th February 2025. This was my sixth nor(DEV):con in a row, having been to every single one since 2019 and I think it’s seen a shift in recent years, bringing in more speakers from further afield. Gone are the days where there were five tracks of talks. Now we only have three, but this year had some great talks. Over the twe days, I attended 14 different talks. In this blog post, I’ll cover the highlights from some of my favourite talks at this year’s event and some of my biggest takeaways. ...

Book summary - When They Win, You Win : Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think by Russ Laraway

Towards the end of 2024, I finished reading a book titled “When They Win, You Win: Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think by Russ Laraway” and its content resonated with me. It resonated with me so much that I gave a presentation about its content to my department at work. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in leadership and management, in this blog post I’ll summarise some of its key points but the book has so much more information and is well worth a read. ...