Client
LADbible.
Industry
Digital Publishing.
LADbible Group is one of the largest youth publishers in the world. We have a global audience approaching 1 billion. We reach over half of all UK adults and nearly two thirds of 18-34 year olds in the UK.
Summary
Acting as the Head of Software Engineering for LADbible during a transitionary phase in the company, I helped evolve their technology offering. This role involved building an entirely new development team from scratch alongside advising the Head of Technology and the Directors as the business scaled. My time with LADbible covered a variety of responsibilities as the company acquired its main competitor and grew the technology team by over 400%.
I worked with Josh for around 18 months, which included re-platforming some of the busiest websites in the UK, and handling a high pressure and very public acquisition. What struck me initially about Josh was how good he is at building relationships and understanding with stakeholders, by bringing a calm, senior presence to any situation. From a technical perspective, his encyclopaedic knowledge enables him to articulate a clear technical strategy, then lead the delivery from the front while getting buy-in from the engineering team. On top of all this, he’s a genuinely humble and likeable character. I very much hope to work with Josh again one day.
Dave Mason, Head of Software Engineering at LADbible Group
Highlights
- Acted as an advisor to the Directors, helping make key decisions from platform technology choices (based on suitability and ability to hire) to how we should architect and scale the platform
- Recruited and set up an entirely new development team consisting primarily of React/Ops developers
- Designed and implemented processes for the development team to run correctly and efficiently, included setting up an agile workflow to ensure the team could properly execute Continuous Deployment/Integration
- Created a React framework for the company to build channel sites from (such as ladbible.com), durable enough to handle the huge amounts of traffic the sites see daily
- Hired a permanent Head of Software Engineering to continue the path the team was set on. We found Dave Mason (he’s fantastic)