About Me

Hi - I’m Korny (which is short for Kornelis) - an Aussie of Dutch/English/Scottish background, now settled in the UK with an English family.

My Role

My current role is a Principal Engineer which can mean a range of things - Will Larsen has a list of archetypes - I think in my current role I’m probably a mix of the Architect and maybe the Right Hand, though they are fuzzy and overlappinh. I also like to refer people to Gregor Hohpe’s article on The Architect Elevator - my job is to “take the elevator” from the boardroom where strategy is set, and the engine room where actual technical decisions get implemented. (Gregor has also turned this into a book) (This is somewhat useful as an idiom but I don’t like the top-down Command-And-Control implications - decisions should be distrubuted, strategy should be in consultation with engineering)

My background - I spent most of the past 15 years consulting for ThoughtWorks, both hands-on solving problems and writing code, and more abstract advisory and advice roles.

Working days

I work a 9 day fortnight - generally that means I’ll be offline every second Friday. My non-working day is for mental health, side projects, and family tasks - even with both kids at school there is always something needing to be done.

However I’m usually checking Slack intermittently, no guarantees or SLAs but ping me there and I will get back to you when I can. I’m happy to spend 5 minutes unblocking someone, rather than have them have to wait until Monday for an answer.

I mostly work from home (sunny Leighton Buzzard) but I intend to be in the London office one day a week - usually Mondays but check my calendar or ping me on Slack.

I plan to link to an internal page with more details, one I sort out how to set up such a page!