Now

Updated Feb 2026

Day-to-day: Leead Software Engineer at LSEG, Nottingham.

Current picks:

Videos and presentations ▶️

These have stuck with me recently and informing what practices I bring to my team and how I navigate my career

• Kent Beck, Tidy First - GOTO Conf 2024

• Reflecting on Continuous Delivery
  (Dave Farley and Jez Humble)

• Martin Fowler Interview: Refactoring - Book Overflow pod

Reading 📚

Really in to audiobooks, but also rediscovering the tactile reading experience of print:

• Alchemy: The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity

• Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual

• Staff Engineer, Will Larson

• Being an Effective Engineering Manager, Dr. James Stanier

• I Love you, Byeee, Adam Buxton

• An Emotional Education, Alain de Botton, School of Life 💭

• A Therapeutic Journey, Alain de Botton, School of Life 💭 , Alain de Botton, School of Life

Classics which I frequently reflect on and are my compass for life, leadership and technical work:

• Accelerate, Humble, Kim et al

• Atomic Habits 🍬, James Clear

• The Meditations 🔥, Marcus Aurelius

Podcasts 🎧

• The Engineering Room, Dave Farley

• Blindboy Podcast

• Book Overflow

Thinking about

• Trusting in myself and my experience, and step up to the challenges I see around me. I'm developing a sense of feeling worthy of expressing myself and having experience which serves me well to feel confident to lead others.

This is not to assume anything I know is perfect information, but it's more important to just do, gather feedback and refine. As long as there's humility, respect, flexibility, we are each able to lead those around us.

In work

• How I can help my team to implement some of the ideas from Accelerate, challenge established thinking and working which no longer serve us in our journey toward CI/CD and high performance. Ai is changing what we can and need to do, such that organisational boudnaries are quickly becoming obsolte. We are not ready for this as an economy.

• I want to coach us to be brave enough to realise the benefits of optimising for feedback; reducing hand offs, and latency introduced with long-live branches, isolating us from the current state of the system.

• If there is no passion and personal investment from individuals in a team, mediocrity grows and is allowed to prevail, and infects the culture.

• As a HSP, I want to develop a reputation for consistency—not necessarily always agreeable, but predictably thoughtful, direct, and steady in how I respond and act. As a highly sensitive person, I’m acutely aware of shifts in tone, subtext, and glimpses into real emotion. These variations can cloud collaboration or introduce second-guessing in communication to me. By minimising variability in my own tone and responses, I remove ambiguity ain my own responses to encourage someone to be open and straight-forward with me as well, trusting my own response as sincere and consistently honest.

• Being deliberate with how I spend time. Having systematically cutting out much 'low value' time sinks and unplugging from social media, there is much time available. I need to be deliberate with using it to foster meaningful relationships and towards fulfilling things like developing my art skills and reflection on my goals and values

• Challenging myself to draw more, even if it's rubbish, and share it on my drawing instagram martino_draws

Thanks for taking an interest!

My Now page is inspired by Derek Sivers' 'Now' page concept. Find out about Now pages.