Services

Sustainability, Content Strategy and Advice

With 30 years' IT industry experience, I provide advice on areas including product development, team building and marketing. This might encompass both consultation on content strategy, including identifying key words to target, and executing on a given strategy including content commissioning and writing.

I regularly carry out independent research and analysis for clients, examining areas such as competitive tooling landscapes, emerging technology assessments, and market disruption analysis. These engagements might involve evaluating how new market entrants could impact existing players, or identifying opportunities for organisations to leverage emerging technologies. While these reports remain confidential to clients, chapter 3 of my recent Kubernetes eBook, which explores the edge vendor landscape, provides a representative example of the analytical depth and approach I bring to this type of strategic research work.

I have a particular interest in sustainability, and can help organisations minimise the environmental impact of their software systems through expert consulting and comprehensive training programs. Working closely with development teams, I can help you identify ways to reduce computational overhead and implement energy-aware design patterns that significantly lower both carbon emissions and cost whether on-prem, hybrid or public cloud.

The following is an indicative, but not necessarily exhaustive, list of the other individual services I offer. I am also always open to discussing other projects not shown here.

Writing

Writing engagements might include the following:

• Technical how-to blog post, incorporating code snippets.
• Technical high-level blog post, which might include interviews. Blogs can be sponsored and placed with a publisher or commissioned for your blog.
• Podcast design and hosting, such as the Hacking the Org podcast for Container Solutions or the more recent GOTO Leadership series.
• White paper, generally about 3,500 words. For example, I authored this white paper for Docker.
• High-level eBook, usually about 2,000 words, not terribly technical and incorporating graphics and visuals for top-funnel skimming/reading.
• Mid-level eBook, my most popular book offering. These are usually about 10-15,000 words and tailored to a specific audience (technical or management). My two books for The New Stack are good examples.
• More substantial eBook, technical, around 30,000 words.
• Infographic, to deliver the structure and copy which a designer illustrates—you really don’t want me doing your drawings!

These can be structured as either “one off” engagements or as an ongoing service.

Training

I love teaching. I can work with both individual engineers and entire engineering teams to improve their writing and communication skills, and can offer advice for conference speakers (including first-time speakers).

I’m particularly keen to help speakers from under-represented groups in tech.

I can also help build a full outreach program for your developers involving writing, speaker training and so on.

Publishing

If you need to prepare your written material for publishing, I will be glad to assist you with reliable editorial and production services. This might include basic copy editing/line editing or more substantive editing help.

Speaking

I enjoying speaking at events, and have done so at multiple international conferences including GOTO (keynote), Devoxx, WTF is SRE, and QCon. If you'd like to talk to me about speaking at your event get in touch. You can find examples of my talks on the presentations page.