Andrew Betts

At Fastly I led the developer relations operation, and helped developers around the world to make their websites fast, secure and engaging. I owned all developer tooling, along with reference docs, developer engagement and community programmes.

I was an elected member of the World Wide Web Consortium's Technical Architecture Group, a nine-member body responsible for guiding the development of the World Wide Web. TAG reviews specification proposals and considers the future development of the web platform for the benefit of developers and users across the world.

On assignment in Tokyo, Japan, assisting Nikkei (FT's parent) in their digital transformation plans. My work encompassed digital strategy, product and technical architecture.

I led the FT Labs division. The FT Web App grew to handle over 60% of the FT’s subscriber article consumption, and FT Labs has launched new initiatives such as Origami, a design system for all FT products, and numerous open source projects including one that was adopted by over 100,000 websites.

I started Assanka to experiment with web technologies. We built one of the first real time live blogging sites, which won two Webby awards in 2008. In 2011, we released the world’s first major "HTML5" newspaper site for the Financial Times. In this role I wrote the original version of what became FT data squasher, widely regarded as one of the craziest hacks to improve offline storage capacity in the browser before blob storage support was available on mobile browsers.

I created an app combining property data from UK property marketing sites with the then-new Google Maps API. OnOneMap proved a successful concept, and was incorporated as a business. It was featured across the national press (BBC Radio 2, The Guardian, PC Pro, CNN, and many others) and was successfully acquired by dotHomes (now part of Zoopla) in 2008.

I worked for the British air traffic control service for a year from the summer of 2001 and saw the events of September 11, 2001 happen in real time from the inside of the aviation world. I created tools to replace legacy communications technology and improved workflows for geographically disparate colleagues at remote radar stations.

Travelling across Africa and working with with local suppliers and users, I designed and built a simple, inexpensive distributed system, with no single point of failure, to manage national inventory and logistics. Tolerant to unreliable infrastructure, power outages, and designed to be accessible and efficient for low literacy users, it was still in use until 2010.