Richard Forshaw

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A proficient technical leader with experience across diverse industries and companies. I specialize in bridging the gap between stakeholder vision and complex engineering and uplifting teams to deliver using industry best practices. I excel in enhancing innovation with rigour, bringing fresh ideas to life in a structured way, always aligning with business value.

I champion:

• Agile & Data-Driven Business Expansion focused on market feedback
• Incremental Value Delivery grounded in constant stakeholder communication
• Empowering teams with the best tools, techniques and information
• Distraction-Free Engineering by leveraging AI and automation
• Staying Skilled and keeping up-to-date with Industry Practices

• Agile Delivery and Team Leadership
• AI-Assisted Development Practices
• Stakeholder Engagement
• Software Design & Architecture
• Coaching
• TDD / BDD
• DevOps & Automation

I enjoy building talented and productive teams that build valuable, real-world systems. I enjoy developing the team members and their environment along the way to get the best performance. I believe in collaboration and leading by example with strong technical knowledge. My ideal role is one of technical leadership providing both team management and technical guidance, enabling staff to deliver key projects linked to the success of the business.

AI Innovation: Adoption of AI tools to increase productivity

• Used AI to augment BDD processes
• Implemented a custom-prompted AI code review agent
• Reduced 'Code Review churn' and time spent by other engineers

Evolving Process Maturity: CTO of Growing Technology Business

• Moved Instatruck from a chaotic, impulsive style to an agile, priority-driven roadmap
• Introduced traceability from priority through to deployment
• Aligned roadmap to business and strategic goals, visible to stakeholders

Technical Process Uplift: Development of DSL Testing Framework

• Designed and championed an in-house testing framework and DSL
• Increased developer productivity and quality
• Reduced friction in TDD practices

Structured Innovation: Development of AI Customer-Support Chatbot

• Led integration of a custom chatbot to relieve customer-support calls
• Balanced engineering rigour with innovation
• Ensured feature-quality in a non-deterministic environment

• Southampton University, UK — BSc Comp. Science (Distributed Systems & Networks)
• Strategic Systems WA, Perth — Software Architecture
• AIM, Perth — Leadership Development
• CEGOS, Perth — Essential Project Management
• DDI Leadership Development, Perth — Ansaldo STS Talent Management Program

Speaker at events and conferences across Perth, Malaysia, Vietnam and New Zealand (2018-present) on development techniques, cloud computing, serverless and DevOps:

• PyCon NZ 2025: “Learn to Love Your Tests Again”
• Tech Meetup Saigon 2023: “Web Analytics 3 Ways”
• Tech Meetup Saigon 2022: “Scrum: Under The Hood”
• Serverless Meetup Singapore 2020: “Serverless: Oh the things that you'll do!”
• Latency Conference 2019: “5 DevOps Mistakes”
• Python Meetup Kuala Lumpur 2019: “260 Deployments, 1 Rollback”
• Discussion Moderator, “Big Ideas Book Club”, Sydney, 2024-present — research and facilitation of monthly non-fiction book selections

• Podcast Creator (2026) — Creator and co-host of ‘The Common Knowledge Club’ podcast, about the history and engineering behind common everyday things.
• CTO Mentor (2025) — Provided mentoring and advisory services to a CTO in an ESG technology start-up.
• Personal development with AI — Worked with SpecKit and other tools to learn to rapidly produce production-level code.
• screenbalance.online (Experimental Startup, 2025) A generative-AI service to help disrupt teens and adults from social-media doomscrolling.
• thingsforkids.in (Website, 2015) A curated list of local child-friendly events, to explore business ideas and digital & social-media marketing.
• pitlanemanager.com (Website, 2011) A Fantasy Formula-1 website to assist in learning Django & web development.
• Photography Exhibition (2013) — Hosted a photography exhibition of original photos.

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