about

who am I?

Hi, I’m Steve Hawkins.

I have been in software engineering for as long as I can remember and for my sins that has been exercised in the financial services sector since I left university in 2006. More recently, since Jan 2018, I have been working with the startup challenger clearing bank ClearBank where running lean has always been the ethos and since becoming profitable this shifted into scaling globally sustainably.

From sometime in 2022 I have been leading the drive for environmental sustainability of the ClearBank SaaS platform and the software products it provides. This was a natural progression from being the platform principal engineer and an evangelist of the Well-Architected Framework the pillars of which include reliability, security, cost optimisation, operational excellence, performance efficiency and sustainability.

I have a young family and after lockdown we moved out of Islington in central London to the Deal on the Kent coastline where I was able to put software engineering, architectural approaches, experimentation to practise on decarbonising the home and travel environment as much as possible.

So I expect this blog will be a mix of personal insights and bringing together the good as well as the bad news I find on all things energy generation / transportation, emissions accounting, home decarbonisation, sustainable software products and anything else in this space I find myself diving into.