Me

Who am I?

I'm a civil servant who once studied physics, and now dabbles in writing software, and has been obsessed with learning foreign languages to near native proficiency for a long time now.

I'm currently the head of the Government Strategic Management Office, inside the UK's Cabinet Office. As part of this I lead a tiny, brilliant software engineering team, as well as being responsible for how the UK does strategic planning for the full breadth of its work, and monitors the full breadth of delivery. I sometimes get to go to other OECD countries and tell them about how the UK does its strategic planning, and how we've built software to supercharge our efforts, which is always very rewarding.

My interests

• Building things as a hobbyist software dabbler, in ways that aren't fiendishly complex
• Swift and the iOS ecosystem
• AWS CDK
• Language learning. In particular (in order of the level I've reached) French, Russian, Italian, and Arabic
• Second language acquisition theory, and language learning software tools, and more generally software for learning
• How to make government better by giving it useful internal-facing software
• Russian literature
• Isaiah Berlin, Richard Francis Burton, Patrick Leigh Fermor, David Deutsch, Richard Feynman, and various other people of a similar ilk
• Classical music