My name is Rob O'Rourke and I'm a Principal Engineer at Human Made. I live in the UK, currently in Sheffield (which is ideal because I love going climbing) but originally I'm from Liverpool which is famous for some stuff.
I've been working with the web since 2005, starting with front end code during the early web standards boom. Since then I have done a mixture of things including design, a short dalliance with photography, server admin, cloud services, developer tooling, microservices in NodeJS and lots of backend code, primarily PHP. I also dabble in data science using Python. You could say I'm a generalist with a short attention span.
I love working on little side projects and experiments to learn new things but don't do much coding outside of work these days. I had some work on the Chrome Experiments website back when that browser was new!
I work UK hours but I'm not much of a morning person so in practice that means 10am to 6pm BST. Any hours I mention here can be assumed to be in BST. Occasionally I will check in and help out after hours if there is an emergency or something needs fixing that would block others from getting their work done outside my timezone.
I do sometimes make use of flexible working hours to go to the gym during the day or take a long lunch but work a bit later to make up for it.
I work as the lead engineer on the Altis DXP product, Human Made's Digital Experience platform built on top of WordPress and countless years of expertise and hours of work from colleagues and the open source community alike.
I'm responsible for guiding the product team in architecting and delivering new features, managing releases and generally ensuring that our product is of a high standard.
As a Principal Engineer I also try to unblock others and when possible share knowledge or mentor others, particularly those on my team.
I sometimes try to be in too many places at once (remind me to focus), I have been known to procrastinate by experimenting with new tech (chase me up on stuff), I can be a bit precious about my code (getting better at that!) but ultimately I strive to be a force multiplier for colleagues and clients. I'm a lot more comfortable problem solving in code than I am with meta tasks and leadership (so don't wait for me if you have big ideas about how we work!). I own my mistakes and I've always got your back.
Coding for me is a very a hands on creative process so when I'm defining a task I often focus on the outcomes rather than being explicit about how to do it. Sometimes this works well but the flipside is I often have new ideas or think of things I missed initially once I actually see some code. This is most apparent through code reviews so it may feel like I'm being needlessly obstructive but it comes from wanting to make the product as good as it can be. If any back and forth is frustrating you please ping me and we can jump in a huddle or real time chat to reach an agreement or come up with a more detailed plan.
In code reviews I try to balance being prescriptive with asking questions to try and get us to go through the same thought process and hopefully reach the same conclusions about how something should be done as a method of teaching or validating an idea. This can be hit and miss and doesn't work for everyone though - sometimes I might be assuming you have some specific knowledge, but also sometimes you will teach me something new. You can always talk to me if there are ways you prefer I approach this.
First and foremost I enjoy helping people solve issues and discussing approaches to achieve our goals, so I'm always happy to be pinged in Slack or mentioned on a GitHub issue. I don't always reply immediately, especially if I'm engrossed in something but I check Slack and my email regularly. If something is preventing you from making progress then it's ok to nag me!
I'm always open to constructive feedback that helps me improve, both as a colleague and project lead. Being straightforward is useful but I generally appreciate it when take a bit of time to word things with tact and care. I can be a bit sensitive initially but I always do my best not to take anything personally, We're not gonna fall out over anything :)