Stef

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Brexit: UK tech industry calls for a People’s Vote - Descrier

Clore Leadership Programme

Oaklands College, St. Albans

University of Birmingham

Director of Product, Platform at On Deck

London, England, United Kingdom

On Deck is a career and startup accelerator community. We help ambitious people to start startups, to grow in their careers and to connect with peers in their industry.

I lead our Platform team which encompasses Data, No-Code, Business Infrastructure and Funnel. We provide data, develop tooling, integrate third party services and build no-code or software systems.

On Deck

Director of Product – Platform

Product Group Lead – Platform

Team Lead, Data

I've joined On Deck on the product/engineering team following the recent $20m Series A round. We're gathering a team of technologists to build the tech to support the company's ambitious vision for #edtech. "To create the modern educational institution for the next 100 years" or "Stanford for the Internet".

My role is centred around "no-code" infrastructure, looking at how to enable the whole team to prototype and build tools and experiences using off-the-shelf no-code tools. On Deck so far has been pushing the boundaries of what's possible with low-code and no-code automation with tools like Zapier, Integromat, Airtable. As a tech/product team, we're building novel tooling to support that culture.

First up, I'm leading on setting up data infrastructure – a data pipeline, warehouse, reporting stack in Google Cloud Platform. I'm also working on rebuilding the sign-up experience to make data flow more easily, and ensure that applicants can submit their applications in a smooth way.

Very excited to be joining the team and contributing in a crucial way when the company is due to grow rapidly. Here goes!

Senior Software Engineer

Oak is a non-profit COVID response project to support UK teachers in continuing to educate their students while schools are closed or students are isolating at home. During the pandemic year we served over 120 million lessons to UK children, and supported ~4.5 million children per month.

In response to the first UK lockdown, a group of teachers and tech folk got together to build a platform for hosting lessons that schools could use to share with their classes.

5 days after I joined, we launched a website with our first week of lesson videos. On day one we served 250,000 users and had zero downtime.

I provided technical leadership (think VP Engineering) on our tiny development team (CTO running product/stakeholders, 1x UX/design/front-end dev,  2x web developer, 1x data engineer). I led the development of our Classroom, Teacher Hub, Privacy, Content QA and WWW web apps using React / Next.js / Firebase / Cloudflare Workers / GraphQL.

We built out a production process/ingest/transcode/delivery system over the Summer of 2020 to provide an almost complete UK curriculum across all year groups in nearly all subjects, ~10,000 lessons made by 500 teachers. All of this is available via a searchable UI for teachers to be able to pick and choose how they use the content we're providing.

It’s been an exhilarating project to work on, and using Serverless approaches and “the JAM stack” has meant our tiny tech and product team has been able to ship almost daily releases throughout.

We're very soon releasing a major feature - all UK mobile operators will be "zero-rating" traffic to our service, which means kids will be able to access the service on a mobile phone without being charged for data. I led this work from the tech side, which is a major architectural change – every single browser request has to go via our domain - no third party calls.

Oak National Academy

Head of Engineering (Full stack / Innovation)

Consulting in ING's London Lab on new ventures at the intersection of finance, tech, and sustainability. By 2040 the world collectively needs to have invested $68T to keep us below 2 degrees of warming. Our team worked on how to build scalable ways to meet that ambition using a lean experiment-driven approach: first, research and discover significant customer pain points, then validate those problems are worth solving, test out multiple potential solutions before committing to building software or digital products.

Within the next decade, trillions of investment will flow into sustainable investments to reach carbon neutrality goals that government and business are setting. To enable that to happen, we'll need to find new ways of gathering data about what is, and isn't a sustainable investment.

As the primary focus of my work in the lab during my time with ING I co-led an initiative from idea through to MVP and initial piloting, called "Overlay". Our team developed an early version of what a sustainability data management layer could look like to help financial institutions meet carbon neutrality objectives through greater efficiency, accuracy and automation.

Developed a software architecture that worked within the constraints of a regulated environment whilst also bringing in modern cloud-based approaches using Azure and serverless / low code design patterns. Tech stack  – React.js / Apollo / GraphQL / Serverless functions / Node.js / Azure. I also designed the brand, identity, slide deck assets, website.

Venture Builder (Consultant) / Co-Lead Project Overlay

Developing new digital ventures around e-commerce logistics and supply chain with backing from DHL. Leading on the technology side of the venture building process, but with a lot of input into strategy, business model and deal structure. Developed a web-based lean experiment knowledge base app that we used to run our business model validation work. Built a web-based technical documentation product that helped us communicate tech decisions to stakeholders from the investing business. Then for the actual user-facing product / software development, focused on a build using a serverless architecture made up of small universal web apps using a Graphcool, Node, GraphQL, Apollo, React, Next.js / Gatsby.js stack.

Rainmaking

Venture Builder – DHL Supply Chain

A passion project that turned into a bootstrapped e-learning business led by my wife, Emily Quinton – an online learning community for makers and creative small business owners, including video courses, data analytics tools and community features via a monthly subscription. The user base grew to over 100,000 while I was contributing.

As the sole software developer and designer, I helped build out Makelight in a lean way from a humble one-page blog post through to a subscription e-learning business built on our own tech stack. There was a lot to build too: landing pages, funnel and acquisition analytics, adaptive remarketing based on on-site activity, course content management system, payments, subscriptions, our own partially automated email newsletter system, notifications, personalised activity feeds, course activity tracking and retention flows, member administration system, an Instagram analytics tool (later became Year of Colour), and lots of third party API integrations to external tools.

I learnt a lot! Tech stack: Ruby on Rails, Javascript (React, Vue, D3), Google Cloud Platform, Heroku, Postgres, AWS, SQS, Postgres, Redis, Memcache.

Makelight

Co-founder – Full Stack Software Developer / Designer

I'm fascinated with the process of developing prototypes into fully-fledged products and businesses. Particularly where you can draw on a unique understanding of a particular technology or industry. At Makeshift I learned a ton about what does and doesn't work, and at Rainmaking I helped build and run a venture studio to kickstart Jaguar Land Rover's InMotion newco.

I hired and brought together three teams to investigate three areas of opportunity. Working in a lean way we discovered and validated business models by building digital prototypes.

We explored new financial and transport models, built out an insurance product, and tested a variety of propositions before the successful products graduated the studio. Feedback from the teams was that this was a huge period of learning for them, and it was for me too.

Entrepreneur in Residence - Jaguar Land Rover InMotion Venture Studio

A startup studio dedicated to giving a leg up to the little guy.

The model was to build a series of small digital prototypes based on our own ideas, test them out rapidly by releasing and getting feedback early, then investing in the ideas that show the most promise.

From about forty or fifty code sketches in the first year, we worked on a cohort of twelve prototypes in twelve months, with three of those progressing with a team, revenue and growth in year two.

As the technical founder / CTO I wrote a lot of the early code on these products, and our preferred stack involved Ruby on Rails, Heroku, AWS and PostgreSQL, although around that time ReactJS appeared and is where I first started using it.

Makeshift

Founder / CTO

For the Autumn of 2012 I was resident technologist on the beautiful (if blustery) Scottish Inner-Hebridean island of Eigg (population 90) through a residency funded by Creative Scotland via Sync. Built a number of interesting prototypes: a "museum website in a box" for their tiny island museum, a subscription music download tool for a record label run from the island, an offline web app to enable visitors to hear about the island as they walk around it, a point-to-point "remoteness" visualisation, and several other small tools exploring remoteness, culture and community.

Creative Scotland

Technologist in Residence

Developed a mobile skate/BMX video app with funding from Red Bull, incubated by Sidekick Studios. Ran a three month project with Comic Relief around rapidly testing ideas that had been developed internally as one-week digital prototypes. Created a new way of running digitally-enabled events, culminating in a one-day strategy event for all ~1000 staff of Accenture's Dublin office using realtime visualisation of conversation data that won a Business to Arts innovation award.

Independent

Freelance CTO / Full-stack developer

Assisting with business development and consultancy for cultural web agency Made Media.

Made Media

Digital Culture Associate

Aframe is a collaborative video platform for professional TV, video and film-makers that takes away a lot of the pain of working digitally.

I co-founded the company and helped grow it from a team of two with a prototype to a scalable software platform with a team of 36, raising $10m of finance in the process.

I led an agile team of talented developers to build a set of products and services, including our own web-based asset management platform, distributed transcode and ingest system, team collaboration tools, rapid metadata annotation apps, desktop application, Avid and Final Cut integration, and lots more.

Day-to-day it was a mixture of technical architecture, research, experimenting with what's next and new, working out what to do (and what not to do), design work (I did the initial branding), and a lot of code - Ruby, Javascript, HTML5, C++, API-wrangling and everything else inbetween.

Aframe

Technical co-founder

One of the first investments for Channel 4's innovation fund 4IP, Help Me Investigate was a website for people to ask difficult questions that they can't get answered elsewhere and collaborate with other people in their local community to answer them. Eg. "Why was the tree outside my house cut down?" or "What was the regeneration funding for my area actually spent on?" Resulted in a remarkable project called "BCCDIY" where we collaboratively built a new website for Birmingham City Council using open source tools at a hackday.

Channel 4

CTO, Help Me Investigate

I undertook an amazing and intensive two years of leadership development, training, mentoring, coaching, networking and personal development supported by the Cultural Leadership Programme. The programme enabled me to research applications of new technology for culture, to develop my leadership skills through high level training and coaching, and to take a step into applying all of this in my next startup in media tech.

Cultural Leadership Fellow

A prototype web platform for fathers. I taught myself Ruby on Rails, re-skilled as a designer / developer and made lots of mistakes. I leave this little experiment here as a reminder that I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now without having taken the leap and committed on this idea and thrown myself into building beautiful, useful, valuable digital products. I've been using Rails ever since for prototypes all the way up to full blown startups.

Odadeo

Owner

Plus was an international festival of design held annually in Birmingham. I helped launch the festival which ran for three years.

Plus Expo Ltd.

Director

A record label specialising in modern experimental music. A passion / side project that resulted in over 100 releases over a decade.

Type Records

Co-founder

An award-winning digital creative agency I set up with Antonio Gould. Originally 3form started as a brand for freelancing as a designer, doing VJ shows (with VHS tapes!), animation, illustration, branding. After leaving WebXpress we founded a company and built a reputation for doing good quality web projects.

We got our big break when we were commissioned to build Vivienne Westwood's site from the ground up, so with Antonio using our own hand-rolled PHP CMS that we'd developed together, and me on design we started a boutique little agency out of the back room of the house we were sharing with a bunch of our friends.

Soon came clients like Mars, Sprite, Kitekat, as well as cultural / creative industries clients like the V&A, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery and First Light Movies. For the latter we won a Webby and along the way we picked up a clutch of business and creative awards.

By 2008 though, I'd become abstracted from the actual creative process. I was young and I found myself running an agency that had turned into "feeding the beast" rather than "being in flow".

I wanted to try my hand at a more product-based approach, so I slowly and gently wound down the activities of the company and undertook the Clore programme. Through that experience I found that my instincts were correct and that I wanted to really follow the "startup" path rather than the "agency" path. I've not looked back since, except to be proud of what our small, talented little team achieved!

3form

Co-founder - Creative Director, then Managing Director

It was the nineties so web companies had names like this back then!

Whilst at WebXpress I was responsible for all visual output of the company and we did some good work for clients using Flash and HTML, as well as developing our own content management systems using PHP and MySQL. We had some success with viral micro games too.

WebXpress

Creative Director

I sold my first web project to a client before I'd gone to University, so while I was there I topped up my income by freelancing. It was a fun time - animations, video graphics, websites, micro games… I learnt a lot about working with clients and building things that people wanted.

During that time Antonio Gould and I met and we gathered with a few others under the umbrella name of "3form", the three "forms" being Technology, Music and Design.

Balancing up running club nights, web projects and studying was a challenge, particularly because around that time I was seriously ill. You can watch one of my videos to see me talk about the spur that time gave me to do what I do now.

Stef Lewandowski

Stef Lewandowski