Andi Smith

Services

Career Highlights and Achievements

1. 1

   Launching Heineken Star Player at the Emirates Stadium

   Standing in the Emirates stadium watching a room full of sports journalists be the first to play Heineken Star Player was an incredible moment in my career. The game allowed football fans to predict the outcome of events occuring in live football matches in real-time with the chance of winning tickets to the Champions League final. I led development of this six month project which released to coincide with the Champions League season. I learnt a lot about latency, sockets and the science of football!

   Heineken Star Player was a huge success and won numerous awards including a Cannes Gold Lion.

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2. 2

   Unifying humans with AI at Bloom Career Coaching

   I've spent most of my career owning other people's technical decisions, whether legacy or inherited. Working at Bloom was my opportunity to do things my way, focussing on great technical culture and effective delivery to provide great business value. The advancement of AI became a huge opportunity for us, through enhancing the human coaching experience with AI guided insights and takeaways, as well as providing an Anytime AI coaching assistant.

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3. 3

   Collaborating in Menlo Park with Facebook and Nike

   For a partnership between Facebook and Nike, I spent a few weeks across the pond at Facebook HQ designing and building a new social experience for runners. I gained great insights in to how Facebook build product and the importance of data in decision making. The project was a great success for Nike Women, and the ideas we came up with are still being used today.

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4. 4

   Leading the MINI and BMW dev teams in Munich

   I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to spend six months in Munich with the MINI and BMW teams leading development of a new car configurator for MINI built with AngularJS. The car configurator was a key part of the sales process for MINI and featured prominently on their websites. The project was a great success and was later adapted for use on the BMW website too.

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5. 5

   Scaling up the tech teams at LifeWorks

   I was hired in to LifeWorks to provide direction and technical insight to the front end team. After a few months I had managed to improve the teams velocity and ability to deliver and was asked to lead the entire UK and Europe tech teams and (later) scale up from 40 to 110 engineers. I introduced a number of new processes to help improve team culture and collaboration which lead to teams working more effectively and efficiently together. I also led the migration of the platform from monolith to microservices improving the speed of release from once a month to continuous deployment.

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6. 6

   Being on the cover of Net Magazine... twice!

   In 2013 I became known as a bit of an expert when it came to debugging web applications. I had given several talks on the subject and was running a website resource to help developers. I was asked by UK publication Net Magazine to write a six-page cover article on the subject. The article was so well received that I was asked to write a follow-up article two years later. I also wrote a number of other articles for the magazine on other subjects such as web workflows.

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7. 7

   Running and Compering Tech London Meetups

   From 2013 to 2017, I ran a series of meetups in London with AKQA called TechInsight exploring how technology informs and enhances product. Each meetup was themed on a particular topic - such as Automotives, Data, Fitness or Performance, and we had guest speakers from companies such as TFL discussing how technology drives the London Underground, Google on how self-driving cars will evolve, and I spoke regularly too. I also helped other tech leaders start meetups in their cities such as Berlin, Amsterdam and Venice, and spoke at a number of those.

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8. 8

   Building independent gaming studio Natomic Studios

   Whilst studying Computer Science at university, I founded Natomic Studios, an independent games studio that released 19 free games on Windows PC between 2000 and 2004. We introduced incentives and interconnectivity in our games through the ability to build and customise a Natomic tank by unlocking parts in each game; and leaderboards to encourage competition. I learnt a lot about the importance of user experience, keeping users engaged and how to build a brand. The games were downloaded over 1 million times and we had a great community of players who frequented the Natomic Studios forums.

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9. 9

   Presenting across the world

   I'm fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to speak in front of audiences around the world. After presenting at a number of meetups in London, I was asked to speak at a conference in San Francisco with my friend at Mozilla, Dave Hunt. It was my first visit to the US and my first conference talk. But it kicked started a love of presenting and I've since spoken at many other conferences. Since 2023, I have been performing Improv comedy to grow my confidence and ability to present on stage.

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10. 10

    [Insert your company here?]

    I'd love to collaborate with your company on your latest idea or approach. Why not get in touch?