Product Engineering leader • Author of Neo4j: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly) • Graphs, code, and the art of building teams and great products.
This is Article 5 and the final one in the Connected or Exposed series, which examines why public sector organisations struggle to answer compound operational questions. Two things are happening simultaneously across public sector. The first is workforce pipelines under structural pressure. The OECD Employment Outlook 2025 documents the picture
This is Article 4 of the Connected or Exposed series, which examines why public sector organisations struggle to answer compound operational questions. Access is granted for a reason. The records are supposed to track whether that reason still holds. They often don't, at least not continuously and not
This is Article 3 of the Connected or Exposed series, which examines why public sector organisations struggle to answer compound operational questions. Governments know what their contractors cost. But do they know what their contractors carry? The institutional knowledge, relationships, and capabilities that migrate out of the department at some
This is Article 2 of the Connected or Exposed series, which examines why public sector organisations struggle to answer compound operational questions. [Article 1: Sequential Systems. Simultaneous Crises.] In the time it takes someone in your organisation to assemble a response brief - pulling headcount from HR, deployment status from
The workforce systems behind your public sector operations were built for a world that no longer exists. Article 1 in the Connected or Exposed series The world is a connected, multi-dimensional environment. Challenges are compound and spill over borders. These facts have always been true. What’s new is how
When I ended Part 1, I was ready to continue using AI code assistants but this time as a teammate. The next experiment was simple: build an internal onboarding tool that creates a hierarchy of entities for a customer. A small Spring Boot CLI application that would hit a few
It had been a while since I wrote some code. A common, wistful thought from those who love to code, but also love leading teams and building products. Sure, we get our rays of sunshine: sitting in on design reviews, jumping into incidents, anticipating thorny issues, nudging productivity along... but
My son is currently working through a module on summary writing as prep for his IGCSEs. Takes me back to my school days where it was précis-writing or "the art of giving a concise and lucid summary of a lengthy passage of prose or poetry" (E. Derry Evans,
Welcome to Graphish! Here’s where I share short observations, discoveries and learnings- they’re opinionated but authentic. My experience is best viewed through the lens of an engineer, product builder, and team champion in small to medium organisations, deploying reliable, secure, mission-critical applications into production in enterprises and sensitive