Chris Shennan

Chris was an invaluable member of the team during his time at The Drum. He provided great technical leadership and worked incredibly hard to move the company's technical stack forward.

He also had a really broad experience which helped us with our general infrastructure and approach to analytics.

Christopher's skills with code, back-end infrastructure and basically every facet of digital product development are unrivalled.

There is simply nothing the man does not know about, and during our time at the Drum he helped give this lowly designer a peek behind the curtains on what really goes on within Docker containers, Apache server setups and PHP environments.

On top of everything he is friendly, approachable and eager to teach. A true gentleman.

Chris has been central to the success of the Herald & Times Group sites over the past two years. From a starting point in Jan 2013 when our servers were running at full capacity and couldn't handle more traffic, Chris implemented a number of changes that improved performance, increased reliability and more than doubled our server capacity without incurring any costs.

While Chris's core skills lie in PHP and MySQL, his wide-ranging skill set and capacity for learning has helped us in everything from Javascript coding to iPhone app development.