Daniel Bryant

Syntasso enables platform engineers to thrive! Based on the team's collective experience working with hundreds of organisations building platforms, we’ve created Kratix, the open-source platform framework. At Syntasso, I'm responsible for helping teams embrace a "platform-as-a-product" approach, educating platform engineers about Kratix, and enabling developers to deliver applications faster, safer, and at scale. Want to know more? Get in contact or visit www.kratix.io and www.syntasso.io

InfoQ provides software engineers with the opportunity to share experiences gained using innovator and early adopter stage techniques and technologies with the wider industry. We carefully curate and peer review everything we publish. We strongly believe that the high-quality insights offered by both our editors and other contributors have the power to uplift entire communities, no matter what their native language. - Commissioned, curated, and peer-reviewed content for a global audience of software development professionals with ~1,000,000 views per month. - Led a team of 100+ regular part-time news contributors (“InfoQ editors”) over 5+ years. All of the InfoQ editors worked as senior full-time practitioners within the software delivery domain. - Advised and worked closely with the executive team and senior stakeholders within the underlying C4 Media organization. - Acted as a brand ambassador at conferences and recruited new editors. Provided journalistic and technical training for new InfoQ editors, and planned and executed regular mentoring sessions. - Wrote and reviewed hundreds of articles that generated millions of page views. This ultimately led to the creation of thousands of InfoQ reader accounts. InfoQ is welcoming new contributors! Software is changing the world, and our mission is to help dev teams adopt new technologies and practices: https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq/

InfoQ provides software engineers with the opportunity to share experiences gained using innovator and early adopter stage techniques and technologies with the broader industry (see above for additional info) - Authored 250+ news items on the topics of cloud, microservices, and Java. Each piece typically received thousands of views, with top content receiving 100,000+ views. - Wrote 40+ full-length articles across a range of topics, from architecture to cloud computing and database design. This content received hundreds of thousands of views and drove InfoQ account creation. - Recorded 50+ podcasts with various software development luminaries, including Kelsey Hightower, Katie Gamanji, and Matt Klein. Each episode typically received tens of thousands of listens. - Collaborated on multiple InfoQ trend reports and published the content as articles and podcasts. According to reader feedback, these reports influence the software development industry and help shape organisational roadmaps. - Bootstrapped and authored the company's flagship monthly newsletter, the InfoQ Architects' Newsletter. Grew the subscriber base from 0 to 300k+

Helping the good folks at Syntasso spread the word about Kratix, the open-source framework for building platforms: http://kratix.io/

I have advised a number of startups and scale-ups on technical GTM strategy and building highly effective DevRel teams. I help companies with topics including: - Building and leading developer relations teams - Product marketing and positioning, including competitor analysis - Building and nurturing technical and open source software (OSS) communities - Planning and executing sponsorship of technical conferences and other content delivery platforms - Executive/founder coaching on the value of developer relations And more! Find the full list of topics at: https://avocadobytes.substack.com/about

Promoted to Head of Developer Relations to continue growing Ambassador Labs leadership within the categories of Kubernetes-based software debugging and development tooling and API gateways. Ambassador Labs enables developers to code, test, ship, and run cloud native applications faster and easier than ever before. Maker of top Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) open source projects, including Emissary-ingress and Telepresence, Ambassador Labs enables teams to build faster and ship safer as a team using Kubernetes. Hundreds of thousands of developers use Ambassador Labs solutions within the open source community and organizations worldwide. - Built and led a team of developer advocates, community managers, and technical writers. Planned and executed all DevRel activities with a six-figure annual budget. - Led the planning and execution of multiple key event sponsorships (KubeCon NA/EU, PlatformCon, DockerCon, etc.). Key results for 2022 included a 6:1 ratio of SQL pipeline generated versus the event budget. For 2023, the team exceeded the target number of MQLs acquired by 150% and achieved multiple onsite earned media placements. - Acted as a key stakeholder for multiple PLG/PLS-based product launches and assisted PMM and GTM teams with persona refinement, positioning, and messaging. - Worked closely with sales (including presenting at multiple SKOs) to answer product questions, generate sales enablement material, and assist with competitor analysis and objection handling.

Promoted to Director of Developer Relations to establish Ambassador Labs as a leader within the categories of Kubernetes-based software development and API gateway tooling. Ambassador Labs enables developers to code, test, ship, and run cloud native applications faster and easier than ever before (see above for full company details). - Bootstrapped a team of developer advocates and community managers after a successful Series B funding round and adoption of product-led growth (PLG). Set the strategy, hired the team, and planned and executed all DevRel activities with a five-figure annual budget. - Led the donation of the Emissary-ingress project (née Ambassador API Gateway, with 4k+ GitHub stars) to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This included sourcing external contributors and use cases, creating supporting documentation, and multiple presentations to the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and SIG Network due diligence committees. - Supported the CEO with analyst briefings to Gartner, Forrester, Red Monk, and others. Provided product marketing support to internal sales and marketing teams and external analyst agencies. - Created the "Ambassador Ambassadors" community advocate program and sourced 10+ customers and community members to join. This resulted in valuable product feedback and several externally created conference presentations covering Ambassador Labs tech. - Led the creation of multiple top-of-funnel initiatives: our first (COVID-inspired) virtual "DevHouse" conference, which drove hundreds of registrations and included presentations from community members, customers, and industry luminaries; and the "Summer of Edge Stack" online workshop series, which drove the acquisition of multiple customers. - Assisted in creating the Associate Customer Engineer (ACE) program to train college leavers and increase diversity within the customer service and engineering teams.

Recruited as co-chair of QCon London 2017-2019 and lead chair for 2020. Lead chair for QCon Plus 2021 Join senior software engineers and architects to learn the patterns, practices, and use cases from practitioners driving software innovation and change.

Working closely with customers and the cloud native community to design tools, platforms, and practices to help software developers deliver applications rapidly and safely.

Switched to a part-time role as sales cycles took radically longer than anticipated and funding was limited. Advised CEO, COO, and engineering teams on technical go-to-market and products. Whether you're building a new application that needs to talk to an old back-end system, or a small microservice that relies on ten other services, managing dependencies doesn't have to be a headache. We build tools that allow you to create a simulated development and testing sandbox - so you can focus on delivering software quickly and without compromise.

Recruited across a partner Trifork company to lead the technical strategy and go-to-market for this seed-funded service virtualization startup. Whether you're building a new application that needs to talk to an old back-end system, or a small microservice that relies on ten other services, managing dependencies doesn't have to be a headache. We build tools that allow you to create a simulated development and testing sandbox - so you can focus on delivering software quickly and without compromise.

Promoted to enhance the company's brand strength and visibility, both online and within the local and international technical communities, with the goal of securing client work and recruiting top engineering talent. OpenCredo is a software consultancy and delivery company dedicated to helping our clients deliver better software faster and cost-effectively. To achieve this, we bring impartial expertise across various technologies and a holistic pragmatic approach to the software development process.

Recruited to deliver client projects that drove business impact within tight budgets and timescales. This was achieved by liaising with stakeholders, leading teams of expert consultants, and working closely alongside client engineering teams. OpenCredo is a software consultancy and delivery company dedicated to helping our clients deliver better software faster and cost-effectively. To achieve this, we bring impartial expertise across a wide range of technologies and a holistic pragmatic approach to the software development process.

Promoted to CTO to define and communicate a technical strategy for the continued roll-out of the epoints v2 platform. Instant Access Technologies (IAT) Ltd was a technology company that specialised in creating and monetising online communities by creating consumer loyalty programs and a series of platforms to enable customers to find the best deals possible within a wide range of markets. - Responsible for ensuring all technical solutions offered by the company were of the highest quality possible. - Led the design and deployment of all customer-facing systems, including the architecture and code quality of software and infrastructure components. - Led a highly skilled team of developers, operations and QA specialists in combination with the Head of Delivery to deliver bespoke software used throughout the company by external customers and end-users. - Responsible for technical pre-sales and contract negotiation for multiple clients. - Created an IAT Technology blog to showcase technical excellence within the company. - Presented at multiple international software development conferences, promoting the innovative solutions implemented within IAT, recruiting new engineers, and sharing our learnings with emerging technologies.

Recruited as a technical leader and consultant to implement v2 of the epoints platform during IAT's scale-up and entry into new markets. IAT Ltd was a technology company that specialised in creating and monetising online user bases. In August 2012, IAT initiated a project to upgrade an existing in-house epoints loyalty scheme and e-commerce product search platform. This platform consumed affiliate network feeds and exposed products to end-users via online shops and portals. The upgrade rapidly transformed into a rebuild project, as initial analysis revealed fundamental limitations with the existing platform architecture. - Led a team of 15+ consultants, both UK-based and ‘near-shore’, to design an architecture that supported new requirements generated by the business. - Implemented components within the project using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Java services that communicated via REST (this was before "microservices" was a well-defined architectural pattern). - Primarily responsible for creating a new affiliate feed cache component, which extracted products from third-party affiliate feeds on a scheduled basis and created versioned deltas for consumption by the search component. Utilised Spring Core, MVC and Data combined with MySQL and MongoDB. - Provisioned AWS EC2 instances using Puppet and deployed application components as RPMs. - Oversaw the successful go-live of the project and implemented additional monitoring and incident management systems.

Recruited as the company's first engineering hire, where the team delivered the initial customer-facing application, secured seed funding, and received a nomination by the Guardian UK as a “Top 100 tech-media company”. triOpsis Ltd used a SaaS business model to offer Web 2.0 style applications that enabled various companies to capture and manage ‘Visual Business Intelligence’. A series of mobile phone-based applications were used to capture images, such as point-of-sale merchandise displays and other metadata. This data was then transferred to a Spring-based application which provided a web portal allowing the users to view, manipulate and extract information. - Managed and delivered several enterprise-grade web applications within an agile development environment under tight deadlines and with limited resources. This included the company’s initial production application, which was deployed to their first customer, and ultimately contributed to the acquisition of angel investment funding. - Responsible for the evolution of the triOpsis server-side application into an enhanced Version 2.0 in 2009, during which time the Guardian voted the company as a “Top 100 tech-media company”. - Primarily responsible for designing and implementing an end-user administration portal which allowed the dynamic specification of metadata to be captured via a mobile application. - Utilised Spring 3.0, DWR and ExtJS 3 extensively for the admin portal, and POI-HSSF + XSSF for importing and exporting application data in MS Excel Format. Used JasperReports for reporting. Contributed extensive documentation to Confluence Wiki in preparation for hand-off to permanent staff. - Profiled all aspects of performance upon receipt of end-user feedback regarding slow application response under heavy load. Primary fixes included tuning JVM memory, improving SQL queries and adding indexes to MySQL 5 databases, which in turn met SLAs.

Developed a series of prototype applications for Technotomy's clients, typically utilising JEE 5 or the Spring Framework. Produced a complete range of technical documentation for clients. This included design and architecture overviews (using UML 2.0 and ERD diagrams), reviews of implementation platforms and toolkits, and hardware requirements. - Conducted extensive refactoring of an existing web application with RESTful services, and added a comprehensive suite of end-user administration functionality using Spring MVC and jQuery. - Began implementing improved Agile practices within the company. Configured new server running Ubuntu with Jenkins, Sonar, Nexus, JIRA and Confluence. Automated nightly builds and reporting. - Created prototype for ‘Greenfield’ project which utilised data-mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to identify semantic relationships between entities within a domain. - Utilised Spring’s RestTemplate to query Google Web/News Search API, and Twitter GET Search API Web Services. Extracted data and potential URIs for mining from web service JSON responses. - Utilised Apache OpenNLP for sentence identification, content tokenization and part-of-speech tagging, and Lucene for indexing, stemming and stop-word identification. Created front-end web application using Spring MVC, jQuery and the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit (specifically hypertree).