Hire me for consultancy, technical editing and speaking

Hands-on product consultancy

I specialise in working with early-stage tech startups who are building developer tools. The teams I work with often don't yet have a product team, and are looking for a leg-up in this area before they feel ready to hire.

My approach is to join the team for 3 days a week for a month for hands-on product support. This often includes building processes to gather and analyse customer needs, running effective internal enablement with other teams, and helping the founders understand what to prioritise. Sometimes I assist in hiring the startup's first product person.

I've got an engineering background, so I'm confident getting stuck in on the technical details and using a bunch of different tools, and I've also got experience on the design side, so I'm happy collaborating with designers, too. I'm versed in common collaboration tools such as Figma, Miro, Slack, Jira, Notion and Airtable.

Take a look at some of my work

Technical editing

As well as working with clients on websites, I also do tech editing for publications. I'm on the team at A List Apart and 24 ways as a tech editor, and I was Ethan Marcotte's tech editor for the second edition of his book Responsive Web Design. I'm currently tech-editing two titles that have yet to be released.

I tech edit work that's still in the outline phase, and also work that's nearly ready to publish.

When I'm sent a piece to tech edit, the main thing I do is check that what's being said is correct to the best of my knowledge. I'll test any code in different browsers, and also add comments where I think something needs to be explained more fully.

Unlike a copy editor, I won't correct spelling or gramatical mistakes, nor will I do line-edits, but I'll often act as a second pair of eyes and flag things that I want the copy editor to look at.

Speaking

I've given over a dozen talks around the world about the things I'm passionate about. When I give a talk, I try and tailor it to the event, so it's really great if you can tell me a bit about your audience beforehand (Is English their first language? Are they mainly designers/developers? Are they at the start of their careers?).

These are the topics I'm currently speaking about:

• Game console browsers
• Front-end Style Guides

I live in London, 10 minutes from the Underground, 30 minutes from the Eurostar, and under and hour to the nearest airport, so it's pretty easy for me to get around. I'm also confident using public transport, and usually prefer that to a taxi.

I'm highly conscious of the need for conferences and meetups to offer a safe space for speakers and attendees, so I only speak at events that have a published and enforced Code of Conduct.

See the events I've spoken at