Pete Graham

In our latest "Secrets to Scaling" discussion, I sit down with Jamie Heywood, former Uber, Amazon and Virgin executive. Jamie's experience of leading companies through uncertainty and delivering exceptional growth is hard to beat, and this first clip gives us a glimpse into a company with a legendary approach to scaling - Amazon - where he led the £2bn electronics category. Stay tuned for more excellent insight from Jamie - including the key role he played in the turnaround of Uber - leading their Northern, Central & Eastern European business through 50% growth. Full episode linked here - https://lnkd.in/e8GWWERH #LeadingThroughUncertainty #Scaling #Amazon

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Two quiet weeks on the Beam Bots project — but quiet doesn't mean idle. Beam Bots is an open-source robotics framework built on Elixir and the BEAM virtual machine, designed to make robot control software resilient and maintainable. This fortnight I've been reworking the servo driver architecture to improve how the framework coordinates multiple motors on shared serial connections — essential for smooth, reliable movement. On the community side, Gus Workman presented the upcoming official Nerves hardware starter kit at the Nerves Meetup EU and gave Beam Bots a shoutout. We're planning to build a balance bot with the kit, which will be a great showcase for the framework on purpose-built hardware. The Nx numerical computing library also hit 0.11.0, bringing multi-device execution support — already integrated into our core. Full update: https://lnkd.in/eGwa2DPs #Elixir #Robotics #OpenSource #Nerves #BEAM

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After an unexpected one-month break, London's Agentic AI Monthly Meet-Up is BACK! We're returning with Episode 8 - and it's a big one. 📅 Thursday 18th June 📍 Hosted at Orbital's office We've got two brilliant talks lined up: Talk 1 - "Would you trust an agent to buy your house? Lessons from building an automated real estate lawyer" Toby Dickinson Williams (Tech Lead @ Orbital) & Éanna Morley (Senior AI Engineer @ Orbital) Talk 2 - "From vibe checks to Agentic Judges" Ning L. (VP Aladdin Financial Engineering @ BlackRock) Two very different domains - real estate law and financial engineering - but the same underlying challenge: how do you build agents you can actually trust? Sign up via the link in the comments 👇 Ross Summers Andrew Thompson Varun Srivastava 🇬🇧

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Stephanie Birch: Single Points of Dependency quietly cap growth and depress valuations. My blog post this week explains where they hide, why they harm scale, and how to start fixing them. It's practical, frank, and built for leaders who want stronger, more valuable businesses ... #SinglePointsOfDependency #SME #ScaleUp #OperationalExcellence #BusinessContinuity #EnterpriseValue https://lnkd.in/e-QJx_DY

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Excellent event hosted by Virgin Media O2 last night. The Growth Signals report captures the experiences and views of a huge range of UK businesses and founders, and highlights some very concerning stats. As I said last night, the challenges raised by UK businesses are particularly worrying as they happening at an inflection point with AI and quantum promising immense opportunities to the countries that are bold enough to act. Our strength should be in deploying these breakthrough technologies by investing in the infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, and talent. We need to push beyond the endless delay tactic of saying “it’s complex” so that the UK can stop being a launchpad for brilliant ideas that scale elsewhere. Instead we must create the environment where those businesses thrive now. #growth #lookingforgrowth #uk #lfg

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I can't help but think the Horizon scandal was in part due to very senior leaders not understanding anything about the business of software and devolving the responsibility of understanding to others who were 'technical.' Some of the testimony from Fujitsu developers / contractors is extremely eye opening. Anyone who's worked in software would cringe at the decisions that were made even though the risks had been clearly outlined to those making the decisions (think direct access to the production database, lack of tests, lack of QA, lack of version control etc). In the age of AI we will see more of these issues unless current and future leaders take the responsibly of educating themselves in this area. Every company now is a software company, yet most are led by people who have no background or experience in this area. Tomorrow every company will be an AI company too.

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Excited to be speaking Today at SRE Day London 🇬🇧 Production today is messy. There’s noise, complexity, and a constant stream of change. Even with modern observability, we still rely heavily on human foresight: logs, metrics, alerts… signals we had to think of ahead of time. And when we didn’t? That’s where blind spots appear. In this talk, I’ll share why we believe agents are the missing layer in production systems. Looking forward to great conversations with the SRE community in London! #SRE #ProductionEngineering #AI #AgenticAI #Observability #DevOps

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There’s a lot of noise right now about AI replacing jobs, but that’s not what we're actually seeing inside most SMEs. The more interesting shift is that companies are starting to expect software to do more than just store information. For years we’ve just had systems of record. They store what happened, they don’t drive what should happen next. What’s evolving is the expectation. Businesses are starting to expect systems that take action, not just record it. Creating quotes, chasing invoices, scheduling work, flagging risks, suggesting next steps. Not as some futuristic add-on, but as part of the normal workflow. AI is helping to accelerate this, but the real transformation isn’t about replacing people. It’s about reducing friction. Less duplication, less manual coordination, fewer gaps between departments. Work moves faster because the system helps move it. In reality, I think success will come down to how easy it is to get things done. The best systems will be the ones that remove friction so teams can focus on the work, not the admin around it. Most organisations haven’t fully recognised this shift yet, but it’s already happening.

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So over the last few months I have seen a dramatic increase of posts on here about AI being amazing, AI replacing Developer's jobs and AI being rubbish at the same time. Every post on my feed when I log in seems to be one of these variations. Let's face it the Internet has never been a place for nuance but this is ridiculous. The polarisation on AI is even larger than the previous LinkedIn monster of choice........."Returning to the Office". 👻 📰 So what is the/my truth? I'm a seasoned Developer, Manager, Director and CTO in the tech space (which is code for "i'm old and i've seen stuff"). I also run a pretty popular AI meet-up in Belfast. In my opinion AI is no different from the evolution of the Developer role I have seen in the past. 👟 Back in the 90s we Internet Developers had a simple landscape. HTML, JavaScript, PHP or Classic ASP with VBScript. 🎉 Then in the early 2000s the world increased. New platforms, new languages and new toolkits. Ruby, .NET, Perl, Django, CSS, various CMS platforms and a flurry of JavaScript libraries. That was before Databases and other things came into the discussion. Back then we had to adapt, learn new skills and evolve as the landscape evolved around us. We did that. We survived. 📱 In the 2010s we saw the dramatic escalation of Cloud technology, DevOps, Agile practices, even more frameworks with .NET Core, mobile app explosion and more. Again, we had to adapt, learn new skills and evolve as the landscape evolved around us. We did that. We survived. 🤖 AI is another evolution. What I think is freaking people out is that the world is not getting larger but getting smaller. We now have tools that can do leg work for us. It makes the cross language learning curve much smaller. It gives us a powerful tool to understand concepts and difference quickly. It makes prototyping easier than ever. It's making something that took time to become an expert in the wide landscape a lot quicker and smoother. 🌹 It's not all roses though. The AI can, and does, get things wrong. It's currently not scalable. I would trust it with some code but not all. I wouldn't trust it with my infrastructure (yet!). We still need our skills. We just need to evolve again. We will do that. We'll survive. Developers being laid off across the globe is, to me, a correction of the post Covid-19 mass hiring when salaries went through the roof and Developer roles were a sellers market. That is correcting itself and companies are letting AI take the blame. It's nonsense. They just took on too many staff. The AI journey is an evolving one and we need to evolve with it but it's not replacing us. We will always need good Developers to make good product. AI will be great for making boilerplate and prototype product but we will need to utilise it, govern it and maintain things. We will do everything faster but that's not a bad thing as the broad landscape was slowing us all down. We Developers will evolve. We'll survive.

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Maddening example of UK media taking a resoundingly positive story and mining it for the single negative data point they could find: Kainos is a Northern Irish company scaling globally, hiring aggressively, opening a new HQ, and growing revenue in multiple markets. And the headline? "Profits fall." That's what the BBC led with this week. And technically, it's true. Pre-tax profit dropped 16% to £32m. But I’d be furious with this if I was running this company. If you're the leadership team at Kainos, you've just executed one hell of a growth strategy. You've expanded internationally. Built new teams. Invested in AI. Secured new clients in healthcare. Committed to a flagship headquarters that signals long-term investment in Belfast. And the only thing anyone wants to talk about is one line in your P&L. In the first half of this year for Kainos, a digital service provider to big institutional bodies: • Revenue rose to £196.1m • Hired 120 new employees in Canada • Expanded into Australia and New Zealand • 43% of their revenue now comes from international operations Their CEO Brendan Mooney says in two years, the majority of their business will be generated internationally — even as UK operations continue to grow. Kainos reduced profits because they invested. They hired. They expanded into new markets. That's what growth looks like, and it costs money upfront. When even great growth stories like this get framed as failure, I worry the constant negativity bias becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. We need to get better at celebrating the companies creating jobs, expanding internationally, and investing in long-term growth (even when it means short-term margin compression). Those are the companies that rebuild economies. ___ I have no connection with Kainos, but I admire what they're doing and thought they deserved better with this story!

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“Don’t optimise early” is *right* for software But “don’t optimise ever”? Only if you want bigger bills and more expensive power I’m looking at 5 - controversial - ways software engineering could do better this week. Number 1 is “optimisation”. The maxim most people know is “Don’t optimise early!” And that’s right. Otherwise you’ll waste time and money almost all of the time. But “don’t optimise EVER”? A big mistake. These days, many people feel that it’s cheaper, easier, quicker (pick any you want) to just throw more cloud resources at a problem. And some application spaces, like LLM construction. often rely directly on pure brute force. (Honourable mention to all teams developing more cost-conscious approaches though!) Because - and this isn’t just about AI and LLMs - hugely increasing cloud usage and forecast usage is… ⚠️ driving up electricity prices [plus factors too, of course] ⚠️ creating water scarcity ⚠️ costing more money! What’s your take - is optimisation a thing of the past, or should it be growing in importance?

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Are you using role-based IR35 assessments the right way? Many businesses use role-based assessments to speed up hiring decisions. It’s a smart way to get an early view of IR35 status, but only if done properly. The key is knowing the difference: ✔️A role-based assessment helps streamline hiring. ✔️A blanket determination risks non-compliance. The distinction matters. Role-based assessments can bring consistency and efficiency – but only when combined with individual checks once a contractor is engaged. Our new article explains how to apply this approach without falling into the blanket determination trap. 👉 Read it here: https://buff.ly/WqYiHgc #IR35 #IR35assessment #IR35Compliance #Compliance #Consultation #HRnews #HR #HMRC

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Claude code or Codex? No one is maxxing AI harder right now than software developers. Last week at DevConf I asked some devs in attendance what their weapon of choice is. What is yours?

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If your company still occasionally spends from founders’ or employees’ personal cards, it doesn’t just mean you have “scrappy ops.” It means: • untracked risk • poor expense hygiene • silent resentment within the team • and a finance team doing archaeology every month Personal cards aren’t a workaround. They’re a signal that your spend system is broken. Period. Get corporate cards, especially the ability to create and manage as many virtual cards as you need from a single dashboard.

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Non-technical co-founders have always been pretty useless at the core aspect of a software startup: Development That is until Claude came along. I still leave the actual development to my amazing technical co-founder Marissa Bond and our brilliant first hire Thomas Ranieri… But as we’ve been building out new features for Thinking Mode, often there is something in my head I’d like to be able to describe in detail. This time last year, I was sketching crappy paper diagrams to attempt to show my thinking. Today, here’s my workflow with Claude: 1. Screenshot our current UI 2. Get Claude to reverse engineer the interface 3. Ask Claude to build what’s in my head until I’m happy. 4. Send to Marissa 5. She chucks out 95% of what I thought was good and ends up building something even better. 5% is still better than useless… 💪 Anyone else using AI to add value towards something you’ve always felt ill-equipped to support?

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"Working backwards - Part Two" Looking at the fallout from the Claude Code leak this week, it’s never been more vital. The newsfeed is on fire with the news of the 512,000 lines of leaked TypeScript, but we have to look past the code and look at the governance gap. Russ Pearlman dropped a brilliant masterclass yesterday, breaking down the massive security and legal implications of this leak: specifically highlighting a feature called "Undercover Mode" (link to his post in the comments). If we work backwards from the enterprise CISO, the General Counsel, and the CPAB Auditor, there are two revelations in that codebase that should keep every board awake at night: 1️⃣ KAIROS (The Background Daemon): Agents are no longer just reacting to chat prompts. They have "wake-ups" that execute proactive, headless background tasks across sessions. 2️⃣ Undercover Mode: A feature designed to auto-strip AI attribution from public code commits to make them look fully human-written (a massive IP and trust nightmare, as Russ rightly points out). If an agent is running autonomously in the background, and its outputs are designed to intentionally hide its own tracks... how does an Audit Committee claim "human-led oversight"? How do Canadian financial institutions pass an OSFI E-23 inspection? You cannot rely on "AI supervising AI" (like the leaked ADVISOR meta-layer) to catch this. You need a deterministic Commitment Boundary: a runtime enforcement layer that intercepts the action and generates a non-repudiable, auditor-ready evidence trail before the action even executes. Continually humbled and amazed by the brilliant architects and leaders I’ve been debating this with recently. The era of trusting black-box agents is over. It’s time to bring verifiability back to the enterprise stack. #AI #AgenticAI #Cybersecurity #OSFI #CPAB #EnterpriseArchitecture

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A short teaser to the podcast I recently recorded with Alya Abbott, which will come out in a couple of weeks... We went deep on the topic of cat herding, otherwise known as managing community contributors. While this is not exactly a third rail in open source businesses, I do think it can be an uncomfortable topic because the reality is often vastly different from expectations and from the 'public' perception about open source projects. At The Zulip Open Source Project, there is a lot of community contributions; a quarter of the commits in the most recent release were from community contributions. That's because they've invested a lot in making the project accessible, from the technical architecture to the communication style. Here's another thing: Not every open source company is going to get a huge amount of community contributors, and that's ok. What I like to see companies doing is being intentional about what they're doing. So if you don't think investing in building a contributor program is worth it, skip it... but do so intentionally. And if you do want a large number of community contributors, put your money where your mouth is.

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Excited to be attending the UKREiiF 2026 in Leeds this year. If you’re attending, come and find us at Stand K32 where we’ll be showcasing some of the work we’ve been building around: - Multi-platform real-time analytics - Data provenance and traceability - Practical, responsible AI implementation - Scalable reporting and operational intelligence There’s a lot of noise around AI right now, but we’re focused on how it can be used efficiently, transparently, and in ways that genuinely support decision-making rather than be a substitute for it. Looking forward to some great conversations across the event with people shaping the future of infrastructure, development, and technology. Check out the N3 Platform over at: www.n-3.co.uk Our LinkedIn page: https://lnkd.in/eu7a4b_c See you in Leeds. 👋 #UKREiiF #UKREiif2026 #Leeds #RealEstate #Infrastructure #AI #DataAnalytics #PropTech #Innovation #DigitalTransformation

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