We recently caught up with our Tech Lead, Dave Ridealgh, to find out more about his experience within the tech industry as well as his key areas of focus within his work at Counter.
What career experiences shaped you most as a tech leader?
My time spent in the classroom team at Northcoders has helped me tremendously. A tech lead is positioned as a mentor to the assigned associates. This involves shaping associates so that they are able to accelerate their own self learning; rather than simply providing them with necessary knowledge and answering direct questions, I’ve found great benefit in asking leading questions to allow associates to arrive at solutions on their own and ensuring they also replicate this methodology when interacting with each other. A key part of our offering is that the tech lead is only a temporary placement; incorporating the knowledge that I won’t always be around from the offset is crucial. Strangely, I find that my years in the front-of-house restaurant trade had shaped my approach here. Keeping a cool head when busy and quickly determining which tasks are excellent candidates for delegation and selecting an appropriate associate to lead/follow in a given situation. All our engagements, although technical at their core, are all based around interactions with other people. Understanding how to navigate the interdepartmental, and sometimes rather political, landscape of an organisation is important. Issues are to be handled by the closest circle of team members first, then cascade out. Both successes and failures can be attributed to the individual internally, but externally viewed as a team contribution to the organisation. I’ve instilled this thinking in the associates to ensure the customer is always happy!
What client are you currently working with?
Currently working within the public sector.
What problem does Counter aim to solve?
Counter aims to solve any/all technical issues/projects an organisation may be faced with. Some businesses can end up with an organisational addiction to contractors. Once a piece of work has been completed, in a traditional scenario, those individuals would leave and the ongoing maintenance of their solution is reliant on the documentation and handover quality to the permanent staff. Counter provides an effective hybrid solution in which the accumulated knowledge of the engineers is not lost at the end of an engagement.
What is the most interesting technical challenge you’ve faced while working for Counter?
The most interesting technical challenge I have faced was actually self imposed and not assigned work. The organisation I’m working with owns a huge data warehouse with a base capacity utilised by many different teams and hundreds of individuals. Prior to our arrival, the historic approach when the shared storage was nearing maximum capacity was to pay the hardware suppliers an ongoing fee to increase capacity. It took a lot of investigation to understand the bigger picture and provide the confidence to question this approach and spearhead an initiative to engage all teams and enforce housekeeping responsibilities. One particular example involved some defective code that essentially dumped huge amounts of unnecessary data into this environment at regular intervals. It required a lot of joining the dots to understand where this data was coming from. It was a separate issue to convince key stakeholders that there was actually a problem. It was naturally assumed that the large consumption of data was a crucial requirement for downstream users, as can be the issue in such large organisations where teams do not necessarily have an awareness of their surroundings a few layers beyond their responsibilities. After converting our findings into some snazzy graphs and charts, we were able to effectively convey the issue and were given the go ahead to perform some complex data cleansing and removal. All in all, this resulted in huge annual cost saving for the public sector. This was challenging as it required an understanding of so many different pieces of the tech stack to gather the evidence and perform the fix as well as needing to knock on the correct doors with confidence to get awareness of the issue in front of the right people.
How do you maintain alignment and communication across distributed teams?
This can be very tricky. Teams should be able to behave autonomously as to bring about the best performance from each team. However, it’s important to maintain knowledge and adherence to a higher level ethos and preferred methodologies as to maintain that alignment when running project in parallel. Education within individual teams of what other teams’ responsibilities are and how their work feeds into yours and vice versa is crucial; this allows for an early understanding of any potential impacts and benefits to those beyond your defined scope.
What advice would you give to developers looking to work at a consultancy?
Don’t think of yourself as a traditional consultant. Being a technical vagabond can be appealing, allowing a developer to hop from job to job and dabble in a whole host of tech. However, you can develop a feeling of detachment from a given project knowing that it is only temporary and you will soon be onto the next thing – this can be impactful to your performance on the current project. Treat each project as your new career – allow yourself to fully invest into the outcomes of the project just as you would if you were a full time employee of the organisation you’re embedded into. This will help to ensure nothing is ‘swept under the rug’ when it comes to long term maintenance. If something could be an issue in future for someone else, ensure you develop the documentation and tools necessary that you would expect were you on the other side of the transaction.
What industry trends are you watching that could impact Counter’s direction?
I think mass adoption of AI tools is the elephant in the room. I don’t think this should impact Counter’s direction in terms of internal goals per se, but could impact businesses’ perspective of the necessity/value provided by Counter. It’s important to embrace AI tools rather than fight/ignore their presence, but it will always be important to maintain a healthy pool of knowledgable developers fluent in the underlying technology.
What tech or tools are you personally excited about right now?
Spatial computing is an interesting one on my radar at the moment. I’m seeing (slowly…) more people wearing smart glasses for example – it feels like it ay be difficult to foresee practical use cases at the moment, but emerging technologies sometimes don’t demonstrate their full potential until someone doing something seemingly unrelated joins the dots further down the line. For example, I don’t think wearing an apple vision pro or some meta glasses allows you to achieve anything you couldn’t before, just in a different way. However this is a whole new possibility that could unlock some quirky and exciting outputs downstream. Also, very personally, AI music generation I’m enjoying dabbling with currently. As a (very much hobbyist) musician, it’s interesting to see how AI can be used here – a similar relationship to a developer using chatGPT to solve a small piece of the puzzle. “How can I write a function that does x without doing y?” becomes something like “how can I get from key x to key y after this chorus without straying into this scale?” – Although AI has been evidenced to be disruptive in this area also (people generating full songs with AI, publishing to Spotify and using AI to generate streams) I see this as hopefully beneficial to the original craft – As you can’t buy tickets to see an AI artist at a concert, I hope it will drive up interest and value in real artists showcasing their craft live. A bit like lab grown diamonds, they’re cheaper and virtually indistinguishable, but something makes us place a higher value on the ‘real thing’, perhaps irrationally – we want to know it was forged in the fires of the Earth!
