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.

Photo of Chris Northwood

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.

Book cover of The Full Stack Developer

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

Culture Shift

Consultant on addressing scaling issues

Head of Development from May 2020

BarCamp Manchester

Volunteer Co-organiser

Mosaic

Software Developer

The Trial Platform

Digital Transformation Project Lead

Single Operator Mixing Application

Product Owner

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

Temporal Expression Recognition & Normalisation in Python

MSc Thesis

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