About
we are such stuff as dreams are made on
Hello and welcome to the site.
Bio

I started out in the 90s as what they used to call a sys admin. Then worked as a software engineer for about 15 years, slowly moving more into software architecture. But whenever I introduced myself as an architect I would immediately feel the need to apologise, because it was (and in some cases still is) a role performed so badly in many organisations that I just assumed everyone would hear the word and think oh here we go, another corporate powerpoint monkey.
That led to a lot of transformational projects (organisations wanting to implement some form of agility, or to become more digital), which in turn led me to one of the founding members of Hive, a start-up organisation funded by Centrica, which later acquired AlertMe for $100m and got me entangled with the world of investors and M&A and Due Diligence. After Hive I joined a scale-up business created by Inflexion Private Equity as CTO and then last year I did an stint as an interim CTO for a UK marketplace scale-up that had seen some wild growth during Covid.
I decided to start writing again because it’s been 5 years since my last posting and I have amassed a lot to say about how businesses think about their tech functions, especially the differences between those who use tech to their commercial advantage and those who for various reasons are unable to embrace it.
I love software and what it can do. And after over 30 years of working with it I still get that tingle when I think they-pay-me-for-this? . And we should all take our tingles where we can.
This is a beautiful field to work in. Few understand just how beautiful. Fewer still see the beauty that could be.
Podcasts & Talks
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Guest on the Cohaesus podcast Tied Together talking about Digital Strategy
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Guest (again) on the Cohaesus podcast Tied Together talking about Composable Architectures
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From way back in 2012 - 100 Year Architecture Talk at O2 Digital Strategy meet-up on Ted Nelson and the web we could have had
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Also 2012 - NoSQL in the Enterprise talk from the CodeKen conference
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2013 The Perils of Big Data article in .NET Magazine
Social Media
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If Elon hasn’t killed it by the time you read this you can join me on Twitter
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I’m also on Mastodon at julianbrowne@mastodon.social
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Linked In - yeah, I know it’s not officially social media, but you wouldn’t know that from the content that gets posted every day
Other
Site Notes
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All content on this site is copyleft - meaning you can use it for whatever purpose you feel like as long as it’s suitably attributed and you apply the same rule to whatever content you create with it.
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The site is 100% static and built with Jekyll and styled using a mildly customised Minimal Mistakes written by the great Michael Rose.