Chris Northwood
Technical Leader and Author
Hello! This is the website and portfolio of Chris Northwood (I'm sometimes found online using the handle laser or a variation and I hold the radio callsigns M3NTW and 2E0NTW). I'm trans, and use the pronouns she/her.
I'm a technologist with a background in tech leadership and full-stack development, as well as campaigner for the Liberal Democrats in Manchester. I work with organisations that want to make the world a better place, most recently at Culture Shift where I built a product team that enabled the tech-for-good startup to scale from £20k to £1 million annual recurring revenue. I use my experience in strategy, architecture and leadership combined with my background as a technical practitioner to lead or advise product teams that solve problems using web technologies across the full web stack.
I tweet at @cnorthwood but I'm slowly moving over to Mastodon, where I am laser@tech.lgbt. I occasionally blog at Medium. You can also get in touch with me using the details below.
I've written a book: The Full Stack Developer, published by Apress. It's the book I wish I had when I started as a junior developer, and covers almost everything I've learnt in my career so far. You can buy it from Amazon.
What I believe
Delivery
- I believe in Continuous Delivery in a cross-functional product team embracing DevOps, design and QA working together.
- I believe in agile approaches to problem-solving, setting up a sustainable flow of delivery.
- I'm a polyglot programmer, working across the full web stack, who believes in using the best tool for the job.
Teamwork
- I work in cross-functional teams focussed on delivery: swarming on problems, rather than siloed roles and responsibilities.
- I believe that software delivery should be integrated into the business, not a separate team.
- I believe in enabling all members of the team to make progress.
Development
- I build accessibility and security in from the start.
- I use Test-Driven Development and Continuous Integration.
- I believe in working at a sustainable pace.
What I've done

BarCamp Manchester
Volunteer Co-organiser
Mosaic
Software Developer
The Trial Platform
Digital Transformation Project Lead

Object-based Production Tools In the Cloud
Technical Architect
Published works: Northwood, C., & Wadge, R. (2018). An Architecture for Cloud-Based IP Video Production Tools. SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal, 127(5), 32-37.

Single Operator Mixing Application
Product Owner

Cook-Along Kitchen Experience
Technical Lead and Architect

Paradigm Shift
Full-Stack Developer

BBC Taster
Technical Lead

Manchester Tech Nights
Co-founder

Timelines
Technical Lead

BBC iWonder
Full-Stack Developer

BBC Bitesize
Full-Stack Developer

Connected Red Button
Full-Stack Developer for TiVo devices

Games Grid
Back-end Developer

Mobile Oxford
Full-Stack Developer

Nouse
Technical Lead

Sophos Anti-Virus for Linux
QA Engineer & Intern Developer

What I know
MSc Computer Science with Speech & Language Processing (University of Sheffield)
Final result: Performance with Distinction
Awarded the Fretwell-Downing prize for performance in thesis:Temporal Expression Recognition and Normalisation in Python.
BEng Computer Science (University of York)
Final result: Second class honours, first division