An introduction

I should be upfront about something. I don't really enjoy writing blogs. I'm a developer by instinct, the kind of person who would rather solve the problem than write three hundred words about having solved it. So starting one feels a little against the grain.

But that's sort of the point. I'm Head of Development at Growcreate, which means I look after the work across support, maintenance, devops, and our projects. A lot of my day isn't spent in the code anymore. It's spent in the gap between two worlds. On one side there's the C-suite, with the big ideas and the direction. On the other there's the development team, who need something concrete to actually build with on a Tuesday morning. My job, more often than not, is to stand in that gap and translate. Turn the direction into tactics. Turn the strategy into something a team can pick up and run with.

That translation work is messy, and it rarely makes it into the things we ship. You see the finished site, not the brainstorm sessions, the false starts, or the decision we argued about for a week. This blog is my attempt to share some of that. The why and the how behind the work, not just the what.

I still code when I can get away with it. For me it was never really about the code as such. It's about problem-solving, and code just happens to be the means to an end I reach for most. That mindset, the idea that the tools are servants to the problem and not the other way round, is probably the closest thing I have to a philosophy. Expect it to turn up here a lot.

So this is the start. I can't promise I'll suddenly love writing. But I think there's something worth saying about how a development team actually thinks, enhances, and evolves, and I'd like to try to say it. Come along for the ride.