A plushy fish on a windowsill looking out over downtown bangkok

Karim & Ant’s Bangkok Adventure (Crowd Favorite at WCAsia 23)

[You ever find a great blog post in your drafts and think ‘damn that’s way too late to post!’? Sod it, YOLO!] The inaugural WordCamp Asia was held in Bangkok Thailand from the 17th to the 19th of February 2023, and Crowd Favorite sent myself (Ant) and Karim to represent the business on this stage…. Read more »

The Crowd Favorite logo in white above a blurred sunset

A New Role – Crowd Favorite Director of Client Engagement

Today we have announced my starting at Crowd Favorite, a global digital services agency delivering Open Source, mostly WordPress based, solutions to enterprise clients. I’m coming in to take on the sales and business development role, working alongside Karim Marucchi and Adam Buckeridge and Meghan Goetz and the rest of the awesome global team. It’s… Read more »

Magnus and Ponyo 2 kittens, sit up on a kitchen work surface

The 2022 Adventure – Part 4 – Real Life

This is part 4 of my review of 2022 – in this post I explore life away from work, with the family, and where things really matter. While all of the work crap was going on, I was also a dad and a husband. And owe it to myself and my family to admit that… Read more »

The 2022 Adventure – Part 3 – Lessons, and What Counts

This is part 3 of my 2022 round up, following up on part 1 on leaving Human Made, and part 2 on the Norse Adventure. I want to draw together some lessons I have learned over the last 1 months, because it has been quite an education, and put them in the bigger context of… Read more »

The 2022 Adventure – Part 2 – A Norse Saga

This is part 2 of my roundup of 2022 – predominantly focussed on my work at Maksimer UK. Part 1 is here. Maksimer are a fantastic agency, established in Norway about 12 years ago by Nils-Fredrik and Anders, they are far and away the best e-commerce team operating in scandinavia They specialise mostly in WooCommerce… Read more »

HM management on a cooking course

The 2022 Adventure – Part 1 – Leaving the HM team

2022 was a bit of an exciting year for me – I left a company I’d loved working with for over seven years, and had grown a global team within. I set up a new company, took overseas investment, plunged into a relatively new market segment, and saw that venture wind up. I made great… Read more »

Me mcing at wordcamp Europe in Vienna.

MCing, Some Thoughts

Publishing a rough draft- links and images to follow:  In the last couple of years I have emceed at a few WordCamps. Not many, but they have been pretty large ones. As someone who works in WordPress and really values the broad open source community around the software, but whose day to day work doesn’t… Read more »

Olkiluoto-3 under construction in 2009, the first EPR to be built. It is scheduled to start electricity production in 2018, a delay of nine years. credit By kallerna - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6954379

Hinkley Point C – Ought it be built? A Series of Hard Questions Part 2

Question 2 – Why is this such an expensive project, and could we do something better and cheaper? Hickley Point is staggeringly expensive. So much so that the Chinese Government is being leant on to pay for it, and the financial head of the operators (Electricity de France) resigned as he says it’ll make EDF… Read more »

Hinkley Point C – Ought it be built? A Series of Hard Questions

Hinkley Point C is a planned nuclear power station on the Somerset Coast. Whether or not it *should* be built is a vexed question – most people i know have an opinion one way or the other, but it’s taken some time for me to try and work my own point of view out. Over… Read more »

Trident and the art of the possible

I am of a pacifist persuasion, but with an unhealthy interest in all things military. It’s curious combination that led to a brief and unhappy stint in the Royal Navy over 20 years ago. None the less I have maintained an interest in the workings of the defence industries and services, especially the senior service,… Read more »

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Latest
  • Human Made

    And now I’m a Commercial Director

    A couple of months ago Tim Dobson told me about an amazing WordPress agency, properly world class, who were looking for a business development person. Having just left exactly that kind of role at Clearleft, I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to try it again, so I did. It so nearly worked out at… Read more »

  • Ant Miller presenting to the BBC Academy Playlister workshop

    Collaboration Workshop Reflections

    Last week I delivered the first round of workshops for the BBC Academy on Collaborative Innovation. The full title was (and this was not my call) “Driving innovation through open collaboration and partnership“ – hell of a mouthful, but apparently hit enough buttons for all but the last session of the day to be booked solid… Read more »

  • Open Source CMS Predictions

    I work with HumanMade at the moment (great team) and a lot of the enterprise level WordPress sites we do get launched on Pantheon. So when a client pointed me at a webinar from Pantheon I took a good look. This is their Open Source CMS predictions for 2015 webinar- and a great deal more interesting than the… Read more »

  • Map Reading

    Collaborative Innovation – the need for Empathy

    Right now I am working up a training session for a client about Collaborative Innovation, a variation on Open Innovation really, or a subset thereof. The senior managers of this broadcaster and engineering outfit come together a few times annually for a day of workshops, training seminars and skills presentations, and this year, I’m pitching… Read more »

  • Helmet + Ears. An interface challenge

  • Profile pix

    Never really know if I’m doing the right thing with these, and I consistently mislay them, but here’s one I took on my iPhone this morning.