Thomas Bailey

My tech career started during the dot com boom, which was lucky because I prioritised socialising over studying at University. IBM were hiring as many tech people as they could get at the time, almost regardless of degree results!

I spent nearly 10 years at IBM, starting as a functional tester, and ending as Test Architect of the WebSphere service registry and repository, a product dedicated to SOAP web services (remember them??). They also financed my MSc in Software Engineering from Oxford University (such a fun course). Love you IBM!

I then moved to, the incredibly cool, Ocado online supermarket as a software developer. Again, I spent nearly 10 years there as I moved into team lead, product owner, and finally the Solutions Architect role, selling Ocado tech across the globe to some of the biggest and best retailers in the world. They were some fun, and incredibly stressful, times, understanding how companies whose core business is not tech engage with a cutting edge tech company.

I left Ocado to create an education start-up, Life Ninja Education, with a long-time friend, and it is during this role that we went all-in on Flutter as our app technology. Admittedly it was a huge gamble, but we would never have had the funds to create native apps, so a cross-platform framework was our best hope of success. I instantly fell in love with the Flutter framework, especially as I had previously grappled with Cordova/PhoneGap and therefore knew the complexities inherent in a cross-platform framework.

I am now IT Director of Optimum Medical who have some very exciting plans for digitised prescription ordering and medical e-commerce, with a Flutter app high on the agenda for future projects.