About Me

Welcome to my home page.

I am a freelance consultant currently based in London. I specialise in software development and agile and lean process improvement.

As a developer, I specialise in writing robust, high performing systems, typically using Java and Oracle. I have experience with low latency messaging, large datasets, search, artificial intelligence, complex event processing, data mining and machine learning, mainly within the financial services industry.

For personal projects and freelance work I use Ruby and the Rails framework. It is the most productive and elegant way of writing clean, testable code, and I keep my fingers crossed that one day Ruby will cross over into the enterprise and bring with it a wave of developer happiness.

Beyond cutting code, I am very interested and somewhat opinionated with regards to the processes that we use to develop software under. Developers interested in process are sometimes disparaged, but I have seen how changing and optimising processes can achieve step changes in quality, performance, predictability and value for money. Almost any team and organisation has this potential if they start to critically look at their development processes and iteratively improve them.

It is for this reason that I am a huge fan of agile and lean software development, and enjoy helping software teams pragmatically implement agile. For me, this is not about particular processes such as SCRUM or Kanban. It is more the focus on continuous improvement of the process and optimising all of the things that go alongside simply writing code that agile espouses.

Thanks for visiting the site. Feel free to get in touch through Twitter, LinkedIn or GitHub. You can also email me at bswootton AT gmail.com.

If you are new here, start with what agile software development means, my agile reading list or the presentations page.