Andy Mitchell, UK

(Last Updated: 04/03/2008)

5 (Professional) Things

• Andy is driven by a desire to change and improve the things that affect him, the people he knows, and the people he works with. This is at the heart of everything he does.
• His chosen vehicle(s) to make these changes are products and businesses. Andy takes great pride in creating focused products that solve specific and related problems, and then ensuring they are polished to the highest standard. Wrapping them up in a business helps ensure they are sustainable and enables them to reach everyone who might find them useful.
• As a consequence of the passion he holds for his work, Andy relishes the opportunity to evangelise. He believes that sales & marketing is a healthy thing, as it helps the products find the people that want them or simply exposes them to the criticism they need to improve.
• Andy is open and community orientated, believing that everything just works better when anyone with something to add can participate in the discussion. This includes riffing ideas, testing ideas, critiquing output, the development process, spreading the word and the personal development that naturally arises through debate.
• Finally, he is independant, favouring work that is fulfilling in itself and believing ‘free time’ - time to spend with friends, hobbies and exploring new things - to be the most desirable reward for any endeavour. He is also far from perfect: despite a personal belief that extrinsic values such as seeking glory and the validation of others - as well as the daily rat-race with your peers - cause major personal and societal unease, he has produced this self-indulgent piece of micro-branding, and worse, has been pompous enough to do it in the 3rd person. He hopes you will take it all with a pinch of salt…

Experience

• ProductiveFirefox

  ProductiveFirefox is an innovative suite of productivity tools that harness the power that being part of the Web browser brings to improve the day to day running of our working and personal lives. Celebrated in the printed press and online, and blessed with a fantasticly passionate userbase, the ProductiveFirefox range has been a true joy to work on.

• Meecard

  Meecard was a startup aimed at consolidating identity online, easing the burden of maintaining it, as well as facilitating self promotion for freelancers and other independants. It won ‘Most Innovative New App’ at Barcamp Sheffield and exhibited at the Future of Web Apps in London, but ultimately failed to find its feet. Having experienced the successes and learnt from the sting of the mistakes & failure, Andy looks at Meecard as an important formative process.

• Dakin Flathers

  Fresh from university, Andy produced a bespoke management system that enabled a company with virtually no historical IT infrastructure to use computers to tightly control production, and efficiently link the factory and the office. This has provided logistical foundations for the company’s growth to be one of the largest and most efficient industrial blade manufacturers in the world.

• Misc Advisory

  Among regular professional commitments, Andy has been contracted for various advisory roles, including the production of technical sales materials and transforming existing websites to better serve and appeal to a new generation of customers.

Education

• Andy graduated with top honours in Computer Science (focusing on software and business) from the University of Durham in 2004. This culminated a long journey of industry-related learning that largely stemmed from my younger self, aged 10, discovering computers provided the means to create and share whatever you could imagine, without the limitations of requiring an adult’s skilled hands or the inconvenience of your audience knowing your age!
• The less formal, but almost certainly more valuable, stage of his education was his passion for travel. Initially grossly self indulgent, the experiences on the road - with a little help from the passing years - have transformed him from a cocksure young graduate to a man humbled with the realisation that he actually knows very little indeed. Somehow, this feels like progress.

Footnote

For a long time I shunned ‘going public’ on the Web, and I’m still not wholly comfortable with it. The root of this concern is that there are already far too many ‘me me me’ pages on the Web, and the last thing anyone needs is yet-another-voice trying to shout over the others. The flip side is that I believe the Web is heralding a new form of communication and social interaction. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. all allow us to communicate by asynchronous broadcast - i.e. we can efficiently reach anyone who wants to listen to us, but without demanding their attention right there and then. Profile pages like this simply augment that communication as a kind of introduction.