Ian's background is in Computer Science with a detour into UX and design. He has worked in client services businesses and in-house across various software engineering, architecture and strategy roles. He currently works as a Software Engineer for Meta and previously as a technology leader for Genesis Global, a low-code platform that enables financial market organisations to innovate at speed. Before Genesis, Ian spent 8 years working for Sky Bet and PokerStars as part of the Flutter family of online gaming brands. He has been involved in many high-profile product launches, most recently the re-platforming of PokerStars Sports, which included a completely new, multi-channel customer experience.
Ian is interested in combining technology with user experience design, focusing on languages, platforms and tools to build products that customers interact with directly. However, Ian is also a big fan of reactive, event-driven systems and spent 18 months building a trading data ingestion pipeline using Kotlin, Kafka Streams and Kubernetes for PokerStars Sports.
Microservices promise rapid evolution, operational independence, and technological flexibility. However, it's important to address the potential challenges that can arise, especially those related to unexpected coupling, reliability and development velocity. Without sufficient care and planning, microservices and agile methodologies may inadvertently undermine the big picture thinking needed ...