About
Hello, I’m Barry, a web developer and manager, working in London. I live in a village in Hertfordshire with my wife and two boys.
Since January 2008 I’ve been CTO of Venntro, a British online dating company that creates the software and runs the back-end for over 62M members on 12,500 worldwide dating sites through our White Label Dating product. I head up our development team.
I’ve recently joined The Influence Room in West London as CTO.
Previously I’ve worked in web agencies, corporates and startups, big and small, in and around London and New Zealand. You can read more about my professional background on LinkedIn.
Any views or content posted here does not necessarily represent the views of my company.
Hacking
My day job is increasingly spent in Google Apps and meetings. Not so long ago I was a full-time developer and although I love my current job, I miss learning and creating new things. This site (and other personal projects) is my way of trying to practise and keep my development skills up-to-date.
Since stumbling across the IndieWeb movement a few years ago I’ve been tinkering with my own platform to participate. This is my attempt to selfdogfood by using the tool I’m building as my own personal site.
Read about how this is built and the ideas behind it in the colophon.
Interests
I try to be an early adopter (my Twitter account @barryf is the 4,677th) and I enjoy trying new services and technologies to help improve my team’s effectiveness and happiness. I’ve been a Mac user since the early 2000s and have owned more iOS devices than I want to think about.
Away from technology, I’m a football fan, I enjoy rugby and cricket, indie/rock music, I like to keep up with politics and I try (unsuccessfully) to avoid showbiz news.
Interviews
- Interview on HackerJobs, February 2013
- Video interview on Online Personals Watch, August 2012
- Interview with Edge, August 2012
- Case study with Rackspace UK (PDF)