The elevator pitch is that I’m a veteran digital developer, having started in the industry in 1997. Over 2010-2012 I transitioned from full-stack web development to full time iOS development.
In 2014 I was asked to be CTO of startup Firef.ly by former head of UX at Sapient Nitro. We raised around £750k from a mixture of an Innovate UK grant and Seedrs.com campaign, and began full time development in Swift in January 2015.
Beyond hands-on development, I was responsible for the architecture of the whole stack, and managed the development team, which was variously between 3 and 6 developers across both native iOS frontend, and Node.js based server-side components (hosted on Azure). As CTO I attended several international conferences to pitch and meet and greet.
At the end of 2017 Firef.ly had a term sheet on the table with a major OTA who were very keen to invest and partner with us; unfortunately unrelated to us, the board made a decision to focus in retail and reduce expenditures in digital. This impacted our strategic partnership and therefore our runway and because of this, I’ve had to consider other opportunities.
So, with 20ish years of dev experience, including 3+ years of solid Swift experience, and a raft of soft-skills learned … I’m ready for the next challenge.