mike harris - software engineering and architecture :: tech leadership :: technology teams
consultancy :: mentoring and coaching :: music
+44 07811 671 893 :: github profile :: linkedin :: curriculum vitæ
(résumé) :: ssh public key :: gpg public key
I enjoy writing, playing, recording and performing music solo and with other fellow musicians and am currently
working to improve my skills in the area of music, learning the mandolin and mandola and to read music.
I enjoy gardening, traveling, reading, walking, socialising, getting to know people and spoken languages. For
the second-half of 2024, I
took a career break to travel through France, Spain, Portugal, and Australia, visiting friends, family, and cultural
attractions. I enjoy learning about cultural and religious history.
I am the co-host of the Agile Oxford monthly Meetup and
annual conference since 2018 and the co-founder of
HacktionLab, a UK network of tech-activists for which I have produced the
BarnCamp annual conference event. I am a fairly frequent presenter and conference speaker. I have experience in
the production of public events and
have devised and produced a number of events over the years. I am also a co-director of XtreamLab, a small
hosting provider providing hosting and low-fi Internet services for small businesses, not-for-profit
organisations, and individuals. Finally, a friend and I are learning Haskell together, which is testing my brain!
Software Engineering Manager - Business Insights & Analytics
December 2022 - June 2024 (left rôle for career break)
In my most recent role at Elsevier, I managed a department of ~30 individuals within the company's Digital Business Systems division. Working with colleagues in multiple countries, including the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, India, the US, and China, my primary day-to-day focus included working across teams, departments and organisations to remove dependencies and deliver new products and updates to expectations. At the same time I strove to ensure my direct reports and their reports were well-supported and heard, applying coaching and mentoring techniques where appropriate.
Some other specific projects included:
Software Engineering Lead (Submission Systems)
November 2019 - December 2022 (promotion)
In my second rôle at Elsevier, I was the lead developer and architect for a number of distributed, event-driven AWS cloud solutions built using a variety of classic and serverless services using Go, JavaScript, Java and Python programming languages. Projects included web-based applications to aid authors, editors and reviewers as part of Elsevier's core publishing process. This was a key focus area for the company: to improve efficiency of the process and reduce the time to editorial decision, whilst at the same time providing a higher-level of engagement with and support for their authors and reviewers.
During this time I fostered close partnership with my product and user experience counterparts to develop and test ideas and deliver, define metrics for, and measure experiments.
It was a dynamic and exciting period that saw me bootstrapping of five distinct software engineering teams in rapidly changing environment, overseeing software development, coaching and mentoring new team members in Agile and Lean software development, as well as supporting and coaching product and business colleagues in Agile practices.
Examples of projects I worked on as tech lead in this rôle include:
Software Engineering Lead (SSRN)
April 2017 - November 2019 (promotion)
The Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) is a subdivision of Elsevier acquired by them in 2016. SSRN supports and promotes the open publishing of conference and preprint (aka working) academic papers, providing an important platform for collaboration and discussion between academics and scientists. At the time of acquisition of SSRN, day-to-day business operation were based out of upstate New York, with software development being done in Argentina and Brazil.
My major responsibility during my tenure was the in-housing of the existing legacy web-based SSRN application and its ongoing development. The incumbent development team was in Argentina, and I was able to use my language skills in Spanish and knowledge of South America to build a solid relationship with the outgoing team.
At the same time I was responsible for standing up a development team based in the UK. Due to the legacy aspects of the existing platform, which was built using ColdFusion and Java, backed by Oracle and MySQL, and the need to operate in a complex and relatively social environment, I recruited a broad-sweep of skills and experience to meet demand.
Ongoing day-to-day operations were involved with overseeing software delivery using Scrum both in the legacy code base, and through introducing software seams enabling us to build using more modern, REST-ful approaches with tools such as JavaScript, Python and ReactJS. In addition, my role included representing the development team in SSRN's quarterly planning meetings for setting of OKRs and metrics as well as mentoring and coaching of team members, and helping to steer our overall technical approach.
Agile Coach
April 2016 - December 2017 (contract role)
Head of IT
May 2011 - April 2016 (left rôle for career break)
IT Officer
January 2009 - July 2010
Co-founder and CEO
January 1996 - December 2008
Windows/NT Integration Analyst (Contract)
October 1997 - April 1998
Windows/NT Desktop Support Specialist (Contract)
September 1996 - December 1996
Desktop Support Technician
February 1995 - August 1996
BTOS/CTOS Support Technician
July 1991 - July 1992
Associate member
October 2022 - June 2024
Upper Second-class B.Sc. Hons in Computing for Real-Time Systems
September 1989 - June 1993
A-levels
September 1987 - June 1989
A-levels
September 1982 - June 1987
