Delivering impactful technology solutions

Open the transcript in a new tab

HENRY HUTTON: Hello and welcome to everyone joining in. We’ll wait a few minutes just for everyone to log in to the link and then we’ll start. Please bear with us for a minute or two.

The numbers are slowly going up so in another minute we’ll start.

We’ll be going very soon. Just a little bit of housekeeping. Any questions that you have please do type them in to the Q & A box at any time. We’ll try and answer as many live as possible. If they are not answered live then we’ll answer them in the Q & A session once the presentation is over.

It’s two minutes past now, I’m sure a few more people will be trickling in. We’ll start off with a brief introduction, so we have plenty of time to listen to our wonderful speakers.

Hello everyone, welcome to today’s webinar: Delivering Impactful Technology Solutions – A look at Made Tech. My name is Henry Hutton and I’m one of the Lead Technology Success Managers here at Hackajob. I’ll be moderating today’s events.

We are going to hear from some of the experts at Made Tech. The speakers will share projects that they’ve worked on, including the rationale behind why they work across them and how this way of working supports individual learning and growth. They will go over cloud services that they use including AWS, skills they are looking for, mentoring and opportunities at Made Tech. As part of this event, you will have the opportunity to take part in the Q & A session and speak directly to the team.

Like I said right at the start, some housekeeping before we get started. If you have any questions during the presentation, please type them into the Q & A box in the Zoom control panel. I will bring them up either at the end of each presentation or at the end during the Q & A, where everything will be answered.

Let’s introduce our speakers. We’ve got Stu MacKellar, Head of Cloud and Engineering. Folora Duang-Arop, Associate Software Engineer, Stephen Strudwick, Principal Technical Architect and Evie Skinner, Software Engineer, who are going to take you through everything today. Over to you, Stu.

STU MACKELLAR: Thanks Henry and welcome everyone, thanks for joining us today. My name is Stu MacKellar, I’m the Head of the Cloud and Engineering Practise at Made Tech. What is Made Tech? We are an exclusively public sector-oriented consultancy. Essentially, we help the public sector deliver technology better. We work directly with our clients; we build software together. We encourage the adoption of modern ways of working and best practice wherever we can.

You can see here a selection of past and current clients on the right-hand side of the screen at the moment, typical of the sorts of clients that we work with.

Moving on to our mission, our over-arching mission is to help the public sector build world class technology teams, to practise the sorts of techniques and ways of working you would see in an internet business. We’ve got four pillars that underly this. Firstly, we help our clients to modernise their legacy technology, often into the cloud. Also, they are working practices, making sure that our clients are adopting best practice and ways of working.

We also want to help our clients accelerate delivery. We want to make sure that they are getting their services into the hands of citizens as quickly as possible. We want to help them to drive smart decisions. We want our clients to be data driven and use automation to achieve that. We also want to enable sustainable technology and delivery skills. We want to make sure we are helping our clients to retain and build the skills that they need and leave them in a better place than when we found them.

Now let’s talk a little bit about my team in Made Tech, which is the Cloud and Engineering Practice. Before we dive into Cloud and Engineering, I just want to give a quick overview of what Made Tech does more broadly. We currently have six practices within Made Tech. The first one is Cloud and Engineering. We work with our clients to build great software and to advise on how to better deliver digital solutions.

We also have our Data Practise. We help our clients to build more data-driven strategies and execute on them.

We have our Delivery Management Organisation which coordinates the activities of our wider teams and ensures schedules and budgets are adhered to. We have our Managed Services Practise, which is relatively new, we’re still building this. Where we support live digital services to minimise issues and ensure that any that remain are swiftly resolved.

We have our Transformation Practise, again, relatively new to Made Tech. This is where we assist clients to plan and deliver end-to-end digital transformation journeys, right from the initial business case to the final product.

Lastly, we have our User Centre Practise. This is where we ensure that everything is designed with the end user foremost in mind. We also validate that the outcome actually meets user needs.

If we zoom in on Cloud and Engineering, I’m going to talk about what the practise does and how it’s structured, what a typical delivery looks like. Cloud and Engineering is by far the largest practise at Made Tech. If we think a bit about what we actually do day to day, there are four capabilities that we have within the Cloud and Engineering Practise.

The first of these is Software Engineering. This is the core of our business, and Made Tech was founded by engineers. It’s still the bedrock of our business. We deliver a mixture of public facing services, the GDS, the Government Digital Service. Many of you are probably familiar with the look and feel of GDS web services. You will see them all over government and local authority websites. We also deliver lots of back-end services and we do a lot of migration work with legacy technology.

We cover a variety of different common text apps in terms of languages. We do JavaScript, Ruby, Java, C##, Python, and several others. The vast majority of the work we do is in the cloud, so AWS is our primary platform, but we do a little bit of Azure work and a tiny bit of Google cloud platform as well.

Moving on to cloud engineering, the focus here is on the platforms themselves, rather than the delivery of software. All of our software engineering is also delivered in the cloud. The cloud engineering capability is more about building partnerships with cloud vendors. We also look at migration strategies for legacy technology, and best practices for moving legacy technology into the cloud. We also look at what is coming next in the world of cloud and try to exploit emerging opportunities.

Then technical architecture. Stephen is going to cover this in a bit more detail, but at a very high level, we help our clients with their technical strategies, we provide architecture support to our engineering teams, and we also provide technical assurance to delivery teams, making sure that what they are building is on the right track from a technical perspective.

Lastly here we have cyber security. All of our technical people must have a baseline cyber security awareness. That is absolutely crucial. We also need expertise to advise and assure our clients and internally. This is where the cyber security capability comes in. The people here are true experts, it is all they focus on day-to-day. We are building this capability as a result of huge increases in threats to public sector digital assets over recent months and years, many of which you have probably seen in the press. This is a massive growth area for us.

If we talk about our team, currently we have around two hundred people in Cloud and Engineering at Made Tech. Geographically diverse, but we have four base locations; London, Manchester, Bristol, and Swansea. We have a very strong community of practise. We are very well versed in remote ways of working. We grew a lot during the lockdown era, so we are pretty used to working remotely and working outside of co-located teams. So, we’ve built a very strong community of practise where we share skills and experience and support each other. Also, we evolve how we work. We don’t want to be static, we want to make sure that as we grow we are changing how we work, and making sure that we are making the best use of the team that we have.

Each of the four capabilities that I mentioned previously have got distinct job roles, each of which also has a set of seniorities consistent across all roles at Made Tech. Those levels of seniority are based on SFIA, the Skills for Information Age framework, which is commonly used in the public sector.

We are a growing business. We’ve got ambitious plans to extend our breadth of operations as well as our overall scale. That means lots of opportunities to progress or to move into other disciplines within Made Tech, which is something we actively encourage.

We also value diversity across our team, we aim to build a team that is representative of the wider community, who are ultimately the end users of what we build.

Talking a bit about the work that we do, we only work in the public sector. For the last four or five years, which is all we’ve done, we don’t do any private sector work anymore. We focus on private sector technologies and methodologies which are similar, but there are some unique aspects of delivering in the public sector that you don’t see so much in the private sector, or at all.

It’s very rewarding working in the public sector, working on things that directly and positively impact you and the people around you is a great feeling. Public sector digital transformation is a very stable and growing addressable market in the sense that there are always going to be public sector needs, digital needs. It’s not prone to some of the economic turmoil that we have seen recently.

In terms of our three core markets we have central government, local government, and health. Central government is a large share of the work that we do. We work with eighteen different departments currently. They range from the Ministry of Justice to the Home Office. Plus, we have various arms and bodies such as the Maritime and Coastguard Agency and the Met Office. We currently develop and maintain the Met Office website and mobile app for weather forecasting.

Looking at local government, we are building our presence with local authorities and have been for some time now. Mainly London boroughs and a handful of councils in England so far, but we are looking to extend that. With a focus primarily on housing-related services. I think that’s just because there’s a lot of work there at the moment. Our end goal with local government is to increase re-use of solutions across authorities and reduce inefficiency. There is an awful lot of re-inventing the wheel, currently, which is expensive. We should all encourage re-use; we are all Council Taxpayers. The more re-use there is, the less burden there is on councils in building digital services.

Lastly, health. We have worked on a variety of initiatives around Covid, which is really what got us into health initially. As an example, with Test and Trace we worked on the data backbone for labs to exchange test results. We currently have four clients in the health space, mostly parts of the wider NHS UK system.

Similarly to local government, the goal there for us is to reduce duplication across trusts and other organisations within the NHS. We really want to encourage re-use and also increase adoption of shared data standards, which is a real issue within the NHS at the moment between different parts of the organisation – not speaking the same technical language.

Moving on to a typical delivery at Made Tech, Flo is going to talk a bit more about DVLA issues as she is currently engaged there. To give you a high-level view of one of our larger deliveries, DVLA based in Swansea, we’ve been working with them since September 2020. We currently have nine blended engineering teams – and by blended, I mean we work with DVLA engineers in teams, which we’ve found to be the optimal way of working. We also have four technical architects working there currently. Overall Made Tech have sixty people engaged with the DVLA at the moment.

The way we operate is that we are onsite forty percent of the time with the DVLA in their offices. The remainder of the time, people are either working at home or in Made Tech offices if they choose to do that. In terms of the sorts of things that we do, we have delivered various different services there. There are all sorts of work that we do with the DVLA, but two good examples that you may be familiar with on the right side of the screen here; driver’s first provisional licence – this is a service that we delivered last year or maybe the year before. This is where people who don’t have a licence currently and want to learn to drive apply for their first licence. This is bringing a previous iteration of a digital service into the GDS standard, and just making it easier to use. Things like integration of the passport office, so if you have a passport, your photograph can automatically be brought into this service and used in your driving licence. Just trying to make all of the application processes as smooth and seamless as possible, and quick as well.

Similarly, ten-year licence renewal. This is something that has just launched in the last few days, so you may be aware that photocard licences need to be renewed every ten years. This is the first time that we have had a proper GDS service that allows that to be done completely online, end-to-end.

Moving on lastly to building our own products. This is something we have focused on more recently. We have effectively built a research and development team internally. We built and launched our first SAS, Software as a Service product in less than twelve months. That is Housing Repairs Online for council properties. You can see a screenshot there on the right-hand side of the screen. I think that’s – I can’t actually see which council that is, my eyes aren’t good enough. We have this live in a couple of councils at the moment. We are planning to roll it out more widely.

Our focus is on local government initially, just because we see so much scope there to deliver. There’s so much duplication and replication of effort, currently. We intend to massively increase our investment in R & D over the coming years. If nothing else, it’s a great way to use surplus consultancy capacity. Obviously with consultancy there are peaks and troughs of demand. When we have people who are surplus to current needs, we can use them to work on our R & D products. It’s a great way to be more efficient, but it’s also a great place to develop best practices. Effectively, it’s a proving ground for how we work and how we deploy new technologies. We can try things out before we test them with real life clients.

That’s it from me. I’m going to hand over to Stephen now, to talk about Software Architecture at Made Tech.

STEPHEN STRUDWICK: Thanks, Stu, hi everyone. I’m an Architect at Made Tech. As an Architect at Made Tech people come to me and ask me, “What is architecture? What do architects actually do?” This is quickly followed up with “How do I become an architect?” and “Do I even want to become an architect?” I’m going to talk a little bit about that to start off with.

We spent some time figuring out what a Made Tech Architect actually is because if you look at the definitions of an architecture role across the whole industry, it’s a little bit confusing. There are lots of different flavours of architects out there. What we think is important at Made Tech and within the public sector is represented in this diagram here.

What is interesting about this is that what we discovered is that our best performing architects and teams aren’t just technical experts, they also have an array of soft skills as well. If you look at this diagram on the right, you will see a lot of technical skills around languages, cloud, and security. A lot of our architects have a software development background, they started off as software developers and then they moved into architecture. What we often say is that it is important to have a breadth of knowledge. You might have a depth in a certain language, and you might have a lot of expertise, but it is important to have worked in multiple languages and frameworks, to get that breadth of experience.

That experience and that technical knowledge isn’t valuable without being able to deliver an impact with a client. We often say that our architects are agents of change. This is really true in the public sector, where we are looking to transform ways of working, to improve software and delivery. What our architects actually have to do is listen, really understand what is important, what the client needs and what the user needs. They also need to play that back to make sure they’ve understood it correctly.

They then need to challenge, to influence, by using presenting skills and speaking skills. They need to be able to use their influence to change direction and to deliver that knowledge that they have on the ground, sometimes through their vision but also through coaching and mentoring and helping the teams around them to be great software developers.

The architect role at Made Tech, the skills, and behaviours there, there is quite a lot to it. With that in mind, we realised that it was still quite confusing for many of our software developers who were wondering if they had the right skills, and could they become an architect. Because of that, we delivered a skills radar. This is an online application. We will share a link to this after this, I believe. It’s on our website, on our hub page. The source code is as well.

The reason we developed this was that it allowed engineers to rate themselves against all the different skills and behaviours, against these different scales, to understand where they might be. So, you self-rate, and then see what radar you present. Then you overlay that against typical positions such as the leader, or principal architect, and see where they are strong and where they need to work on different areas for improvement.

What is really interesting about this is that we use this not so much to gauge people or assess people but to spark the conversation. Normally maybe a senior architect or manager, or maybe another engineer will have that discussion. We find that our engineers sometimes might be surprised that certain skills such as resilience are a really important skill for an architect. It’s common for people to be quite spikey on this graph. They have really strong technical skills but maybe they haven’t had much exposure to business practices, or maybe they find presenting uncomfortable. Maybe it’s something they want to work on or it’s something they don’t want to work on. It helps to gauge that understanding of whether architecture is right for them and whether they should pursue it or not. If they do want to pursue it, on what they should work.

That leads us on to the next part, which Made Tech is very focused on. It’s one thing to identify the skills and behaviours, and things you might want to develop, but you can’t leave people on their own to figure out how to improve that. We have to give them some support. So, we really focus on learning on development. With that in mind, we developed a number of learning resources. We have developed an architecture handbook. This is on GitHub, it’s pretty much all open. We developed an introduction to software architecture learning path. This is for everyone. It might be that you are just out of the Made Tech Academy, or you might be a Senior Developer. It takes you through our opinion of what a modern digital architect is. It points you at learning resources that we think are important. It might be books, it might be blogs, it might be YouTube videos. We try to create that down to something that is manageable, and in a few hours, you can work through it and get an idea of what an architect does, and what we believe is important. Just to get an introduction to some of the principles that will be useful to you when working on the job.

With that in mind, we realised that when we put architects into roles such as the DVLA, we need to give them as much support as possible. We have had a number of people recently who have moved from engineering positions into architecture roles. It’s a natural movement inside Made Tech. We want to be able to give them support by providing them with play books, effectively a framework to help them through those first engagements without necessarily telling them exactly what to do. It’s not you must do this, this, and this. We’ve developed quite a comprehensive playbook. Unfortunately, that is internal, that is the only thing that you can’t access to if you visit the website, everything else you can.

We use that playbook to really support and be consistent in our delivery for our clients. I want to talk now about how that plays out with our clients.

Stu showed a slide earlier with lots of departments we work with. To a certain extent, all of those clients we provide with architecture support. Even if you are an engineering team building a particular service, you are still making decisions about architecture on a day-to-day basis. All our engineers are effectively architects. Also, we provide architects to support the teams. We might have an architect role as part of a wider team. In particular, for these central government departments such as Department for Education and for Business and Trade. We actually have contracts that provide focused architecture support for their central architecture team. We help those departments to deliver architecture on the ground, but also shape how they deliver architecture.

At the DVLA we have a wider contract where we support the DVLA across a number of different things. We found that the architecture role emerged there. We saw that they had an Enterprise Architecture team and they had very clear business goals and outcomes that they wanted to achieve, and they had developers on the ground trying to deliver that. We found that they were struggling to connect those two together. We organically ended up placing our architects to bring the whole business together. That ended up being very valuable for the DVLA. I’ll talk a bit more on the next slide about how we do that.

The important thing that we find about the modern digital architect, especially in the public sector, is the idea that they are connecting all the different parts of the business. We are stealing an idea from a great book by Gregor Hohpe called the Architecture Elevator. He has this idea of thinking about architecture or an architect’s role in that they move up and down an elevator within a building. Imagine in the top floor you have the boardroom and the decision makers and the exec team and the stakeholders. In the boiler room, you have the developers building and delivering the services. Up and down all the different floors in the building you have different teams, and different people. Maybe service areas, maybe product teams, maybe delivery managers.

What the architect does is move up and down the elevator and stop at the floor to explain and demystify ideas. They remove friction. They conquer complexity and they bring about change. They make sure that the needs and the issues of the team delivering the services are communicated to the exec team and vice versa. The outcomes and the needs of the business are communicated back down to the boiler room, and all of the people in between. This is what the modern architect does.

In the old world you might have enterprise architects only working with the business and the exec team. You had technical architects only working with the delivery teams. We find more often, especially in government, that the idea of having a more roaming architect is extremely valuable.

If we go to the last slide, this is pretty much what we end up with as what our architects do with government agencies. They bring about this change of behaviour. What we see on the left here, we’ve got the old school principles and processes in the drab grey. We used to see, and we still do see a lot of heavy documentation. Maybe an architecture team goes to a delivery team and says, can you fill in this Word document with all of these design assets and risk logs? It’s very much an out-focused approach. Using our architects, we try to transform the business into a leaner, more activity-focused approach.

We try to encourage the teams to continually visualise their architecture using C4 models and diagrams. We use diagrams of code using structure diagrams recently. We try to get people to continually do that throughout their delivery.

Then on top of that, add in workshops and activities such as THREAT modelling, architecture diagrams, landscape diagrams for working as a team in these activities as a team, to bring out more effective risks in ways that engage everybody in the team. They end up more impactful for the client, but also, they are leaner and easier to work with for everybody, and everyone has a much better time.

This again comes back to our architects being agents of change. They bring about transformation and they work with everybody in the business. This is very much the ethos of how Made Tech works with government. We are transforming them to leaner, more agile processes that everyone just has a much better time with.

With that in mind, I’m going to pass across to Evie. Evie is going to talk about what life is like as a Software Engineer at Made Tech.

EVIE SKINNER: Thanks Stephen. Hi everyone, I am Evie, and I am a Software Engineer working with the Maritime and Coastguard Agency currently.

In addition to your day-to-day project work, you can get involved in some wonderful things. The first thing I want to talk about is the Engineering Book Club that we have. It’s been running for just under a year now, and it was set up by someone at Made Tech, a Lead Engineer.

There is really a lot of scope, if you see a need for something or you have a desire for something to happen, you have the freedom to just go out there and set it up yourself without question. It’s really wonderful to have the freedom to do that. In particular, the Engineering Book Club is something that I really enjoy going to. We have it once a fortnight on a Friday afternoon.

We just get together in a little group and we read a book in our own time to do with software engineering or the software development lifecycle. It could be to do with something more technical, or it might be to do with something less technical like business development. We get together and we take turns to facilitate the club. We talk about the themes of the book, and it provides a wonderful springboard for really interesting technical discussion about coding concepts and things like that.

To give you a flavour of what we have been reading about lately, we are currently reading Clean Code. I facilitated the session about comments a couple of weeks ago, which was really fun.

We’ve looked at the Pragmatic Programmer as well. We’ve also covered a non-technical book called Edge, which I think is about digital transformation. It’s a really nice way to learn and network with other engineers at Made Tech, and maybe even find yourself a mentor or a mentee. I found my mentor through the book club, so it’s my favourite, actually.

Next we have the General Community of Practise, and the kind of space that having that sort of model of the Cloud and Engineering Community of Practise, and the sub-groups that Stu touched upon within that. We have the Data Scientists and Engineers, who have a capability and they make resources. Most notably about how Software Engineers can go into data science, which is very interesting.

We’ve got the Community of Practise Session, which happens on a Tuesday after work every week. Again, it’s very grassroots led, so we take turns to facilitate that as well. We present a discussion about something to do with cloud and engineering that we are interested in. We talk about it in breakout groups. That slot on a Tuesday can also be used for someone to do a presentation about something that they are really passionate about. You could use it to talk about a user story or a feature that you have developed on a project you are working on, and talk about the highs and lows, the technical journey that you went on and what you learned from it.

In addition to that Tuesday session every week, there are other workshops that tend to spring up as well, on an ad-hoc basis. Lately someone took the initiative to do a refresher session centred around test-driven development and pair programming together with TGD. That has been mega interesting. I particularly like how everyone is just so passionate. You find people popping up every now and again and taking that initiative to do a workshop and facilitate that learning together. It’s really wonderful to see.

Next I want to talk about employee-led groups that are not necessarily technical but more based around different employees’ individual needs. What I mean by that is again grassroots led groups that we have in Slack. We have Slack channels dedicated to people possessing a particular protective characteristic. We’ve got one for instance for employees with disabilities. We have a closed group which is just available to those individuals who have a disability themselves. We have an open Slack group for those individuals plus allies and supporters who want to get involved in that kind of community action.

The one that I am most active in myself is the LGBT group. Similarly, we have a closed group just for those who identify as LGBT+, and then one that is open to allies as well. We use these groups firstly to provide a support network to colleagues possessing that particular characteristic. Secondly, we use them to organise socials every now and again, which is really fun. In the different regions we get together and have socials. We also use them to spread awareness, and as a bit of a springboard to talk about for example LGBT+ issues, and talk about transphobia, and talk about trans visibility day, which happened on Friday last week.

They are just really wonderful spaces to get together and mix with likeminded people.

This leads me finally to touch on the Meetup I started with other Made Tech teammates called Queer Tech Bristol. This grew out of the LGBT+ group at Made Tech. It’s a monthly in person tech meetup that happens in Bristol. It’s sponsored by Made Tech now, so we are able to leverage the support of Made Tech for a one-off event a couple of months ago. Then that grew into a really strong collaborative relationship between our two organisations, whereby Made Tech are actually supporting us on a regular basis as a VIP sponsor.

It’s really wonderful to see. This is just a flavour of the different fun things you can get involved in outside of your day-to-day.

I’m going to hand over to Flo now, to talk about career journeys.

FOLORA DUANG-AROP: Hello everyone, thank you for coming. I’m going to talk about my unconventional route into tech, and how I finessed my way into software engineering. Thank you.

Previously I worked across fashion, government, education, and film. Everything all changed in September 2021. I just decided I wanted to become a software engineer. I didn’t have a CS degree, no coding knowledge, nothing. But why not? Anything is possible, right?

I was a member of Coding Black Females and also Black Valley, they are coding diversity groups. They provided me with resources. I learned HTML, I taught myself CSS, JavaScript, I built some stuff, broke some stuff, fixed some stuff, built some more.

Then I came across Made Tech, and I applied. I filled in the application, and I actually just hoped for the best. I was like, it is what it is at this point. If they call me, they call me. If not, it is what it is. I got a call back; I was very surprised. I went through the whole recruitment process and then I got an offer for the Academy which started in January.

This is me, in the Academy with some of my teachers. There is Clare, there’s Kyle and there’s me, there’s Dom and Ollie – he is the talent partner that was taking care of our Academy.

The Academy is a twelve-week intense, full training programme. It’s also paid, one of the reasons I applied because they pay you to learn. There were twenty-two of us from all walks of life. We had people straight out of university, people that had CSS degrees. We had a builder one time. There were a number of parents like me, returning to tech or transitioning into tech. It was a really fantastic group of people.

It was a rollercoaster. It was very intense. We learned agile software development, programming principles, testing, we coded in Ruby, JavaScript. We had to do a group project and my group project was to build a booking form for a government client and a text app called CSharp and we deployed it somewhere. It was a year ago, I can’t remember now.

I learned so much because it is deeper than just the code. Being in the Academy taught me about communication skills, problem solving and also an insight into being a consultant engineer. It was really good. It really prepared me for the rest of my career. Now we are changing the Academy to an apprenticeship. I’m not sure, I think someone from HR will tell us at the end.

We graduated the Academy. This is one of the highlights of my career. We took part in a hackathon. Me and three of my colleagues in the Academy went to a hackathon somewhere in Shoreditch. We literally built a travel app. It was amazing because we had the whole company behind us. Marketing gave us swags, we had T-Shirts, bags, so much stuff. We had so much advice from the engineering community. They were so helpful, giving us tips on how to solve the problem, how we should present our code, how we should break down the hours.

It was really amazing. My line manager was so supportive. I can say it now, but at that time I didn’t know what a hackathon is. It sounded good to me, but I’d never actually been to a hackathon, so my manager was explaining to me what a hackathon is. He taught me APIs. This was a whole Made Tech group effort. It was amazing because it made me feel confident in my abilities. I had just graduated from the Academy. We were up against people that were more experienced than us and we won two out of four categories. We actually won some money as well, so that was really good.

The next slide is what I do for my day job. I am working with the DVLA as Stu mentioned before. The DVLA is one of our bigger clients and I am on the ten-year renewal project. It is so exciting; I properly love it. My team is amazing. My team is made up of DVLA staff and Made Tech staff. We work in two-week sprint to build features for this application. We work in the cloud, there is AWS Cloud, Ruby on Rails, some Typescript, a little JavaScript.

We recently launched our private Beta, which means that we have built the first version of this. That should be launching soon. I’m very proud of what I do.

The team dynamic is amazing in that there is a lot of mentoring and coaching and support from other engineers. I have regular one to ones with my Made Tech Lead Engineer, who talks to me about my career, how I feel, gives me tips on how to improve.

I get to travel to Swansea which is good, a couple of days a week I go to Swansea and stay in a hotel, which is very nice. As a mother of three it is nice to get away. Also, for me, it’s just being able to build something that has real world positive impact. Just reading up on the requirements and the reason the DVLA is improving their online process mean that for more people across the land now, it is easier for them to renew their licence. So yes, I’m very happy.

That is my journey from being a self-taught coder, a mother, my unconventional route into Made Tech. Any questions, let me know and I will try my best.

HENRY HUTTON: Wonderful, thank you all very much. Just a quick wrap up so that any questions you want answered are fresh in your head. We’ve got a couple of previously submitted questions. Stuart has been asked a couple of questions, so we’ll jump into that.

STU MACKELLAR: Thanks Henry. Just to summarise a few key points about life at Made Tech that we have covered today. Firstly, we work with our clients to build great software and deliver digital solutions. That’s really what we are all about. We offer opportunities in multiple different career paths, including software architecture and cyber security. We encourage people to get involved in varied activities and projects alongside their consultancy work, as Evie talked about.

We really value learning and mentoring, we support career change, development, and progression, as you have seen from what Flo mentioned.

We are always on the lookout for talented people to join us. Please take a look at our careers page if you would like to find out more about the roles that we have open at the moment. Thanks everyone for joining us today, it has been great to talk to you.

HENRY HUTTON: Wonderful. A couple of pre-submitted questions first. The first one is what advice do you have for career changers from a non-tech background? Flo or Evie, do you want to take that one?

FOLORA DUANG-AROP: I would say definitely go for it. We are very fortunate that we now live in a society where there is a lot of free online information out there. I would say what helped me is that I had a plan, I had a vision. I decided that I wanted to be a software engineer, then I found a community that could support me. My community of Coding Black Females, that specifically work to get more Black women into tech. Then there is Black Valley, which is for more underrepresented groups to get into tech. From there I was able to find mentors, people to help me fix my code. Just learn a little every day. That’s what I did. I had a plan; I would do something in the morning before I do the school run. Then I had my day job and then in the evening I would do my mummy duties, put the kids to bed and learn some more.

I researched all the companies. Because I was transitioning from my previous role within the government, it made sense to look at tech within government. I had transferable skills whereby my technical knowledge wasn’t that strong, but I could leverage my public sector knowledge. Definitely research companies.

For me what helped is that I liked the mission and vision that Made Tech had. They really want to make a difference to the general public’s lives. I felt that this was the kind of company I wanted to work for.

The recruitment process was really cool in the sense that they treated me like a human being. It was very quick; they were straight to the point. Have a plan, find a mentor, join a community, and maybe just do a little bit every day. I don’t know, Evie, what do you think?

EVIE SKINNER: Yes, marvellous. I would echo a lot of what you’ve said, definitely. Especially about finding yourself a mentor and finding yourself a support network. Transferable skills are a big one. If there’s some skill that you have that you have built up from all of your years of experience in your non-technical background – for me it was modern languages and teaching – then you can definitely leverage those skills to your full potential because it means there is something different about you, that people that do have a technical background might not necessarily have. Often those skills are a bit different, a bit out there, more human side skills that are harder to teach.

I would say Code Bar. If you are from an underrepresented group, I love Code Bar. I met my girlfriend there, actually. It’s amazing and you should definitely look that up to get some help on your project.

HENRY HUTTON: Wonderful, thank you very much, both. Linked to this, once someone has a role as junior developer, what do you think are key things to do or get involved with to try and stand out and get access to work on even cooler projects?

EVIE SKINNER: Things you can do to stand out in your application?

HENRY HUTTON: More as a junior developer, once you’ve got your foot in the door. Is there any advice on what you should be focusing on?

EVIE SKINNER: Definitely try and pair with people that are more experienced than you, or mob with multiple people who are more experienced than you. If someone is running a workshop, go to the workshop. Try and steep yourself in the unknown, so you can learn as much as possible. It’s going to feel a bit overwhelming, a bit confusing, but if you just go for it and try. If you go to the book club and you have no clue what people are talking about, you can look stuff up and ask questions. That’s going to contribute to a bigger learning curve. Just get the biggest learning curve possible, I would say. What do you reckon, Flo?

FOLORA DUANG-AROP: I second what you’re saying. From my experience, the Made Tech Engineering Community is really good. Everyone is really willing to help. Definitely putting yourself out there, asking questions. For example, Evie helped me with one of my projects when I was in the Chalet. I have reached out to other engineers. OK, you’re a principal engineer, what kind of things can I do as a junior or entry level to further my career? It starts with a conversation, I feel. We are an open community; everyone is always helpful. If they are busy, they will tell you they are busy. Sometimes it can get quite busy on a delivery, so that is my caveat there.

HENRY HUTTON: Absolutely.

STU MACKELLAR: Let me just chip in on that because I’ve got a few thoughts on that as well. Over and above what Evie and Flo have said, I absolutely agree that being outside your comfort zone is a great way to learn. That’s something I would definitely recommend.

Talk to as many people as possible. As Flo said, there are lots of opportunities in a consultancy environment to interact with more senior people, and a variety of different people.

That leads me on to my final point. If junior engineers want to learn quickly, consultancy is a great way to do that just because of the sheer variety of work that you get involved with. So, if anyone is looking to accelerate their journey through the ranks in their software engineering career, consultancy is the way to go.

HENRY HUTTON: Absolutely. There are a couple of questions come through that people have asked. We’ll go over them so that everyone who has attended has some visibility over them as well. Someone has asked regarding applications from women in tech returners. The Academy is a great place for that and can support with reintroduction into tech after some time out. Definitely look into that. There are quite a few questions around the Academy and the apprenticeship. Do keep an eye out for that, do register via the link at the end and the team will be in touch. There will be lots of information around the Made Tech Careers Academy. They are open to everyone. Someone asked whether it was employees only. No, very much open to anyone.

I had an interesting question for Flo. When you were looking at moving into tech, I know you touched on what attracted you but was there a specific point during the process at Made Tech where you thought, this is going to be a really interesting place to join?

FOLORA DUANG-AROP: Yes. The recruitment process was really cool. My first day of the Academy I was like, what is this?! It was being flung out of my comfort zone. This is the thing. When you are a self-taught coder, it’s just you and your machine. Going into the Academy I had to code with other people. Learning to read other people’s code, writing code that other people can read. That’s when things got interesting for me. Working as an engineer is a collaborative endeavour, it’s not just you on your own. So that was something new I learned.

There is a lot of talking. People think that it is just you and your machine typing away but there are a lot of conversations that happen before you write anything. The Academy really opened my eyes.

HENRY HUTTON: Thanks very much. There’s lots of interest around open roles at the moment. Does anyone want to go over where the offices are, and the opportunities for travel in terms of work?

STU MACKELLAR: I can probably pick that one up. I covered the four base locations we have: London, Manchester, Bristol, and Swansea. That’s where our office spaces are, and also broadly where our clients are centred as well, although we do have some outliers. We hire around those four locations. We also have people dispersed all the way through the UK. Orkney is probably our furthest reach.

In terms of the roles, we have open, it varies. We hire quite rapidly. Software roles, we currently have roles open for mid and senior level software engineers. We are about to hire for technical architects, and other roles will come and go. There are some cyber security roles on the way as well shortly. Really, the best way to find out what is currently on offer with Made Tech is to keep an eye on our careers page, follow us on LinkedIn and we regularly post updates there on open roles.

HENRY HUTTON: Thank you. One for any of you, potentially Stephen, are there any growing areas you think would be valuable for people to focus on, even from a tech stack or more transferable skills level that would be useful both in terms of public sector work and Made Tech as well, with your internal projects in the future?

STEPHEN STRUDWICK: I can try to answer that one. It’s always tricky to predict the future, in terms of where technology is going. We see a lot of JavaScript obviously. It’s been around a long time but it’s growing inside government rather than decreasing. Lava cloud adoption again is something that there’s a lot of in the public sector. A lot of services deployed in on-premise data centres. There’s a lot of moves to the cloud with AWS and Microsoft Azure being the two big players.

We’re seeing a lot more Microsoft adoption for Microsoft Cloud. That’s something we are seeing a greater demand for in the public sector for skills. I don’t know if anyone else has got anymore thoughts on that, maybe Stu or Evie?

STU MACKELLAR: Just reflecting on that, in the public sector and I suspect the private sector as well, the biggest shift I’ve seen in the last couple of years has been the move towards serverless. It’s been a huge pattern for us. We’ve spent a lot of time migrating cloud-based infrastructure into serverless just because of usage patterns. It really does have quite a significant impact.

EVIE SKINNER: Cloud adoption is a big thing that I’ve seen on my project, and adoption of more of a dev ops mindset. You build it, you operate it, we want visibility on it. Infrastructure as code, implementing that has been a big thing, definitely.

HENRY HUTTON: Wonderful, thank you very much. There are some more questions around career changing but I think Evie has already answered this very well. They are very open to any background, the skills radar that Stephen shared earlier is a great way to have a look at your skillsets, but also keep an eye on the website and careers page and the Academy will open up again in the summer for the next batch, so keep an eye out there.

I had a question related to your book club, Evie. Is there a particular stand-out book or theme of books that would be a great starting point for someone looking to get into more technical literature?

EVIE SKINNER: Absolutely. Clean Code. If I could recommend one single book, I think it would be that one. The way it is written is friendly and approachable. It’s not written in a dense way. That’s a great book. The principles in that book, it’s quite easy to see how they apply in your day-to-day. That’s been a standout thing we’ve been discussing in the book club for someone to look into, definitely.

FOLORA DUANG-AROP: We get a learning budget where we can buy materials, books, or courses that can help you in your career. We also have learning time, where you can take time off to learn stuff. I would add a book that is really good. The Pragmatic Programmer is a really good book, easy to read. It gets you into the mindset of what makes a good software engineer. The code does matter because you do want to write code that works, it’s not about writing buggy code but it’s deeper than that. It’s a mindset. I would definitely recommend The Pragmatic Programmer. It’s a fantastic book.

HENRY HUTTON: Wonderful, thank you all very much for giving everyone a deep dive into the really valuable work that Made Tech are doing that touches everyone’s lives across the UK, and for the insight into the Career Academy and career changing.

For all the attendees, if there are any further questions, please do reach out. As a follow-up we will be providing a link to their careers page where you can find a list of all the open positions, as well as benefits. If you are interested in career opportunities, please do register via that form in the email and we will come back to you as soon as possible, and obviously connect with everyone on LinkedIn. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you very much everyone.