Digital resume of a Modern CTO and People Leader
As a Chief Technology Officer, I am deeply committed to creating innovative and robust technical solutions that align seamlessly with business goals.
My leadership as a CTO is characterised by a pragmatic and forward-thinking approach that balances cutting-edge innovation with practical, reliable execution. I strive to build technology that not only meets current needs but is also adaptable for future challenges, all while maintaining a human-centered focus.
At its core my philosophy is encapsulated within Kent Beck's mantra:
"Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast."
I am an advocate for cloud-native principles and serverless architectures, utilising managed services cloud functions to minimize DevOps overhead. Indeed, this site was hand-crafted using CloudFront, Lambda@Edge, and S3. This focus allows me to concentrate on delivering high-quality code without the distractions of server management and security patching.
I love the cloud and all that it offers, but I'm not a fan of vendor lock-in as each cloud vendor offers different pros and cons. Therefore, once out of prototyping phases I encourage a cloud-agnostic strategy where possible. Utilising IaC solutions such as Terraform ensures flexibility and scalability across different providers. If I had to choose a vendor to lock to, my preference is currently AWS as I'm an AWS lambda fanboy, however I'm keeping a close eye on Cloudflare's WASM workers.
I believe in the importance of compatibility and stability. My preference is to leverage natively supported languages for iOS (Objective-C, Swift) and Android (Java, Kotlin), thereby ensuring that solutions are reliable and maintain the highest level of performance.
While React Native and Flutter offer cross-platform development advantages, they may not always align with the priorities of stability and native performance. Their reliance on a bridge to communicate with native modules can introduce overhead, potentially impacting the overall user experience and making maintenance more challenging in the long run.
However, it's essential to note that the landscape of mobile development is constantly evolving, and technologies like React Native and Flutter continue to mature. Therefore, whilst I currently believe, native development offers a more robust solution, the future may see cross-platform frameworks closing the gap.
Inspired by the Unix Philosophy, I emphasise the importance of modular design within projects, ideally creating components that excel at single tasks. This modularity ensures that solutions are flexible and easily integrable into various configurations.
If there is one thing I've learned within my profession is that as soon as you are opinionated, that where the blocker settles. There is a fine line between configability and complexity so this is an area that often needs a pragmatic approach.
A decent chunk of my recent career has been within a Business-to-business setting (B2B). As such I prioritise seamless integration of technology into partners' ecosystems. By adhering to standard design patterns and guidelines, I eschew complexity and help drive create intuitive and adaptable solutions that blend effortlessly within partners' existing systems.
I believe in maintaining a high-quality standard and emphasise the importance of quality assurance. As such, I'm a keen advocate for the implementation of unit tests and code coverage in a development process. Unit tests are essential as they allow validation and ensure the quality of product.
Code isn't finished until it's documented and tested.
Similar to the the previous point I'm a zealot for standards. Standards help to maintain consistency and streamline the development process. Within teams I believe the importance of establishing common coding standards. Again...this is all about being pragmatic. Like I always say you should never deal in absolutes! 😉
I value a solid build process, as it is essential for seamless deployments. While having a documented build process is important, continuous integration (CI) is not always strict requirement. However, I do emphasize the need for thorough documentation in all our coding efforts to ensure clarity and maintainability of our codebase.
In the healthcare technology sector, safeguarding patient information is paramount. I ensure solutions adhere to the HIPAA, or any other applicable standards to ensure that all patient data is handled with the utmost security and confidentiality.
With a global reach in mind, I ensure that technology solutions are compliant with legislation such as Europe's GDPR. This commitment to data protection and privacy upholds the rights of individuals which is something I strongly agree with.
Fancy a chat? Drop me an email at terence@stupple.au and let's talk about tech, ideas, or anything under the sun!