Hi, I’m John Barton - startup CTO and obvious Microsoft Encarta® enthusiast. I’ve spent most of my career leading small to medium sized software engineering teams with a focus on developer-driven ops. Most of my time these days goes into leading the product design and engineering teams at Amber.
My true passion is boring friends and co-workers alike with slideshow presentations of Nautical History Facts.
Before joing Amber I was founder of a Startmate funded startup called Hecate building tools for engineering leaders to better stay in touch with their team’s work.
Before that I was VP Engineering (defacto CTO in the second half) for 99designs. That was preceeded by another startup I co-founded, the film centric social network Goodfilms alongside the inestimable Glen Maddern and Charlie Gleason. Even before that, I led engineering for the Envato marketplaces. I did even more things before that which you can scroll through at your leisure on My Linkedin.
I maintain a few open source libraries and hobby projects. godotenv is a reasonably popular port of the much more popular Ruby dotenv project. letour is a website I refresh annually that lets Aussies sleep through the Tour de France and catch the highlight reel in the morning without spoiling the result. sqltocsv is a handy little Go library to make it easy to do spreadsheet exports from your database. My most popular project by far however is the sarcastic joke RFC for the 7xx Developer Error HTTP status codes.
Recent Posts
- Shutting down Hecate
- Developer to Manager: Founder Interview
- Engineering Management: The Pendulum on the Ladder
- AMA: What books do you recommend for the new CTO?
- Code Review Review is the Manager's Job
- How Should Managers Code?
- Happy 10th Birthday Pull Requests!
- Developers On Call
- Book Review: One Strategy by Steven Sinofsky
- Three flavours of iteration
- 2017 In Review