So here's a bit of an intro to kick things off... Despite weeknoting (or working with people) for years, I'm never quite sure if people know what I actually do.

I'm "Head of Technology" at OCSI, and my remit (as I see it) is basically to keep systems running and to make sure developments get delivered. This includes developing the codebase(s), server infrastructure, development and QA processes, security - and all the team stuff to help this happen, including 1-1s, reviews, and supporting tools and environment.

(I also have a Director hat, which means I also get to stick my oar in on how the company as a whole is run.)

Team-wise, we have 3 full-time developers (1 mostly front-end, 2 mostly back-end), another senior management member who helps out, and a half-time sysadmin. I'm probably about 2 or 3 days out of my 4 a week on dev duties, on top of that. So there are enough of us that others tend to 'do' the work, and my main role is to keep everyone working well together, across the team, and across the company as a whole.

For processes, we've been running fortnightly scrum sprints for 5 or 6 years. We coordinate work internally using Jira, plus heavy reliance on Slack, Google Docs, and ZenDesk for user support. Our scrum is very dev-heavy, and we've only recently really looked at defining the Product Owner role a bit more clearly. We've also started taking UX a bit more seriously recently (which is nice) but there's still some overlap between UX and PO, I think.

(We run a slightly complex mix of products - 2 products which overlap slightly, but 1 of those is actually 4 different products. We handle these within the same sprint and same team.)

My day-to-day challenges are mainly trying to keep everyone connected and happy: Making sure that relevant people are consulted up front; that decisions and progress are communicated to everyone; that change happens for the right reason and in the right way; that we know what we're doing for at least the next 3 months; talking to people to check they're being challenged in the right way, and that we're doing what we can as a company to help them not go mad.

I still code, but more for urgent stuff or complex code changes. I'm more involved in code architecture/design and review these days, as well as working out what the hell to do with the code I wrote 6 years ago ;)

Tech-wise, we mainly use a LAMP stack (MariaDB, PHP), but have other parts of the ecosystem running VisualBasic apps :-/ on Windows, plus a Node app, and some older C# and Python code around too. As a company, we also rely heavily on Word and Excel as we generate these automatically, because clients still love documents. We use a mix of dedicated servers and VMs, both "at home" and co-located or cloud-hosted. We use git for source control, phpunit and Selenium for automated testing, and most of our work is based on home-grown frameworks, apart from Bootstrap and jquery.

That probably covers all the basics - I figure different people will be interested in different parts. Maybe I should post this publicly somewhere :) Anyway, questions more than welcome.