Recent content on Mark Evans — Director of Engineering
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Most people haven’t heard of blood bikers. The short version: we’re volunteer motorcyclists who transport urgent medical supplies for the NHS out of hours. Blood products, plasma, samples, breast milk, medication. The things that hospitals need moved quickly when the normal courier services aren’t running. 
 I ride for Greater Manchester Blood Bikes. It’s unpaid,…
After leading major re-platforming efforts, I’ve come to believe that the biggest risks in a re-platform aren’t technical. They’re organisational. 
 The Myth of the Big Bang 
 Every re-platforming conversation starts with the same temptation: “Let’s just rebuild it properly this time.” It’s seductive because it feels clean. But it ignores the most…
While investigating a data reconciliation issue between Amazon Connect and our WFM system, I discovered that CTR (Contact Trace Record) segments can result in double-counting if you’re not careful about how you aggregate them. 
 The Problem 
 Our contact volume reports were consistently showing ~15% higher numbers than what our outsource partner was reporting. The discrepancy was…
Every engineering leader I know has had the same frustrating conversation. You’re in a planning session, you raise a concern about the state of the codebase, and you reach for the phrase “technical debt.” The room shifts. Product managers glance at each other. Someone asks if it can wait until next quarter. The conversation moves on. 
 The problem isn’t that your…
Talk Abstract 
 As scale-up companies experience rapid growth and expansion, their once nimble and efficient startup codebase can often become a hindrance to further scalability and innovation. Re-platforming is often the solution — but this presents a formidable challenge. 
 In this talk I discussed the complexities of successfully re-platforming for scale-ups, highlighting the issues…
In 2019, I relocated from London to Manchester to build Moonpig’s engineering hub from nothing. Not to expand an existing office or manage a remote team from HQ, but to physically move, put down roots, and build a second centre of engineering excellence from the ground up. 
 It was a big personal decision. My life was in London. But I believed, and still believe, that you can’t…
Every time I’ve stepped into a senior engineering leadership role (at Nested, at Moonpig where I was promoted to Director, and at Zopa), I’ve had to navigate the same tension. You were hired to make things better, and the organisation expects you to operate independently and solve problems from day one. But you also need to avoid making changes for the sake of making changes. 
 The…
I first wrote a version of this in 2014. Over a decade later, the same patterns keep repeating, so it’s worth restating how I prefer to work with recruiters. This isn’t meant to be hostile. I genuinely value good recruiters and have made some excellent hires through agency partnerships over the years. But I’ve also wasted a lot of time on interactions that could have been avoided…