Welcome to Transpire Steve, how have your first few weeks been?
Thanks! They’ve been great – I’ve had the pleasure of a number of walking meetings in the park that have helped me get up to speed on the business, spent time with each of the team getting to know them, and had a couple of “coffee roulette” catch ups that allowed me to meet people across the business. I’m also excited for the Transpire Hackathon coming up soon – what better way to meet people than jump into a team and compete for some great new swag and prizes!
On the tech front it’s been a fast start. I’ve noticed a really strong passion for learning in the team and it’s great to see the investment in training to match it. We’ve been busy organising time for training in the coming months – I’m signed up to a couple of courses myself, and putting in place ways to share the great ideas that surface while we’re delivering for our customers. I’ve always believed some of the most valuable things you learn are in the heat of a delivery – design patterns that make serverless solutions really perform are hard to engineer for in contrived challenges, and I’m excited to learn from the team and what they’re delivering.
Before joining, what did you know about Transpire and what were your impressions?
I actually met Josh recently through a mutual contact. We caught up in between lock down periods for a coffee and he introduced me to Transpire, and the principles and values of the business. They resonated with me – particularly the level of trust and empowerment the teams have. I’ve had the good fortune to work with leaders who have placed a lot of trust in me and it’s something I look for in a role.
I spent a bit of time looking through the work Transpire had done – not just the technology, but the focus and impact. Projects like the AGL solar exchange, and the Vodafone Foundation piqued my interest both from a design and technology perspective as well as the impact they created.
Everyone is talking about cloud these days – what does it mean to you?
Funnily enough I looked at my AWS billing this week and realised I signed up in 2005! It was a pretty simple service back then with services like Mechanical Turk, Alexa Information Service and Simple Queue Service launching in and around that time. It’s a very different story now with a wide range of mature capabilities that support the transformation of business process and practice.
As we abstract further from the core computer, storage and network that underpins all of these capabilities we find simpler models for scaling the reach and impact we can have with our digital solutions.
That’s what the cloud is to me – maximum impact, for minimum complexity.
Tell us about your vision for Transpire’s work in cloud
Over the last two years we’ve seen our customers go on a journey of resolving immediate issues to enable effective, safe work from remote locations. That change has proven that when we organise around it, we can deliver rapid change that enables effective business.
With Transpire’s experience in delivering design led digital experiences we’re well positioned to help move to the next stage of that journey. Combining a move to a safer, more efficient use of cloud with a design-led approach to finding the solutions that best meet the needs of employees and customers in what is a dynamic and increasingly digital environment.
Delivering modern web infrastructure through our ability to bring API’s to life securely and efficiently using tools like AWS Lambda and API gateways, scale them, and ensure we’re designing to drive value out of the data being generated is going to be critical to enabling the innovation organisations are going to require to navigate this period.
What are your first priorities?
Now my feet are under the desk – I’m focused on working with the team to drive out how we’ll deliver on the Transpire strategy through cloud. While we’ve got one eye on the future, we’ve also got customers already looking to us to help them deliver the AWS solutions that will power their businesses. That means we’re looking for cloud engineers that are up for delivering impactful solutions!
