Director, Product Engineering at TELUS Health. Coding for 15+ years, a TDD advocate, PHP fan, with an interest in Complexity Theory and a History Degree.
I am an Engineering Leader and Software Developer with nearly 20 years of experience. I am a Director of Product Engineering for TELUS Health and lead a team of 70 frontend, backend and DevOps engineers across Europe and North America. My job is to keep my teams focused on their strategic goals and ensure they continually deliver software that achieves those goals. I do this via good, consistent communication, removing roadblocks, minimising noise, supporting my team's wellbeing and helping them mature.
As a software developer, I have written a lot of PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript and SQL. I've done a lot of DevOps work, building and configuring servers and cloud platforms, I love the command line. In addition, I've worked with C#, Ruby, Python, Java, Rust, Scala, GraphQL and MongoDB, so my software experience is broad. I believe in continual learning and I've learnt new things from every language I have used.
I believe good software is easy to understand, well-tested, secure and performant. This is difficult to achieve as software is complicated and the development process is complex. Teams have to mature towards good software. Methodologies like Agile, Extreme Programming, Continuous Deployment and Test Driven Development can help. Along with observability, you can't fix what you can't see.
Teams must have strategic goals and focus on what they will deliver over the next few sprints to achieve them. Importantly, teams and businesses must be persistent. To solve complex business problems with software teams must persist over a long period, sometimes two or three years. This is the only way to achieve strategic goals. It is also much better for team and individual wellbeing as it reduces pressure. This is critical for long-term performance, talent retention and domain knowledge retention. To achieve great results teams must set a consistent, maintainable pace and persist. Rushing towards deadlines is a recipe for failure.
At TELUS Health I've helped my engineering teams mature and produce better software. We completed a massive migration to Mongo Atlas which improved our security, performance and observability. We also rolled out Datadog APM and RUM across our platform which further enhanced our observability and performance. I have worked at both large and small organisations, so I understand how to work and get things done in both small, nimble environments and large, strategic environments. I've built and sold my own small business and created one of the first social media anti-bot algorithms. I've contributed significantly to Open Source Software which taught me a lot about software best practices such as SOLID, TDD and Static Analysis. I am a strong, confident communicator and have spoken at conferences such as MongoDB.local and PHP UK.
I like to work for organisations that will challenge me as this is the only way to learn and grow. Company culture is important to me. Whether large or small, organisations must be agile in their approach. Organisations obsessed with governance and bureaucracy will not innovate or succeed in the tech space. I believe employee wellbeing is of fundamental importance, burnout must be avoided and flexibility provided. Burnout will lead to the loss of talent and domain knowledge. And you can't build a diverse, well-rounded, successful team without flexibility. Innovative organisations must prioritise these issues because the opportunity and replacement costs are enormous.
I lead the globally-based, 70-strong, Product Engineering team which builds and maintains the TELUS Health One platform. The TH1 platform provides employees with access to mental health and wellbeing services. It is used by tens of thousands of companies globally and supports more than 50m employees.
During my tenure, I have guided the team through a challenging merger and acquisition process; worked closely with Product to deliver significant product initiatives; helped boost platform observability with the rollout of Datadog APM and RUM; completed significant migrations to platforms like MongoDB Atlas to improve performance; supported Women in Tech initiatives; helped the sales and customer support teams with client requirements; And been involved in start-up acquisition processes.
I led the backend engineering team which supported the TELUS Health One platform. Initially, the team was 25 strong but I grew it to 40 within 18 months.
My role provided engineering leadership and vision; architectural oversight and guidance; support for individual engineers; close work with Product on the roadmap and deliverables; helped the engineering, infrastructure and security teams with the rollout of best practices; and initiated significant platform upgrade projects.
Eurostar is a European rail operator and package holiday provider. I worked within their online development team as a Solution Architect. I helped define technical solutions so Eurostar could deliver its business goals. The role involved technical research, coding, documentation, stakeholder consultation, and mentoring.
The projects I focussed on included security and content management. This included work on Auth0, Content Security Policies, and Jam Stack technologies such as Sanity and Vercel. The languages involved included TypeScript and Scala. I left my role due to the impact COVID had on the travel industry and Eurostar's business.
Breakthrough Media were a communications agency where I was Head of Technology and ran the software development team. It included front-end and back-end developers, DevOps, QA and project management, and the team ranged in size from 8 to 16.
My role was both hands-on and managerial and included a lot of strategy, architecture and consultation work. I helped design several systems including data warehouses for Breakthrough’s government clients. In addition, we managed and built data insights tools using Python, JavaScript and Tableau, along with some AI and Natural Language Processing work. The team also build and maintained 40 content websites for government and public sector clients.
To review my career history in full please visit my LinkedIn profile /in/robdwaller.
StatusPeople was a Social Media Analytics company I founded in 2011. The company was closed in 2018 because I no longer felt I could offer a professional service to our paying clients. StatusPeople developed a number of systems, all built around PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. The main tool was a Social Analytics platform which allowed marketers to interact with their social media channels and track user interaction. This platform was sold to another company in late 2013.
The most successful product though was The Fakers App which was launched in 2012 and did Twitter follow analysis, highlighting how many fake followers an account had. It was very popular, was mentioned in Mashable and on CNN, had 1.5 million users and was still generating incoming when StatusPeople was shut down in 2018. The Fakers App was run as a free service for a further two years and was closed down in early 2020. All the code for the App was open sourced on GitHub so others could make use of some of the ideas contained within.
My time running StatusPeople and supporting my own systems taught me a great deal about coding, dev-ops and database management as I had to build and maintain everything myself. It also taught me a lot about the business of technology and the contract law which sits around it.
Read more about the Fakers App