CoolPlanet

What CoolPlanet does

CoolPlanet builds software for industrial decarbonisation. The customers are large organisations with energy-intensive operations: manufacturing plants, data centres, food processors, pharmaceutical sites, commercial real estate portfolios. The job is to help them measure where their energy is going, find where it's being wasted, and reduce the spend and emissions that come out the other side.

The platform is called CPOS, the Cool Planet Operating System. Under the hood it's a time-series-heavy SaaS. Sensor data flows in from connected equipment, runs through a pipeline of calculations, projections, and rollups, and surfaces through dashboards, alerts, and reports. Customers configure their own KPIs, equipment classifications, and site groupings; the platform handles the maths and the visualisation. It's used by everyone from the plant engineer chasing an anomaly to the C-suite tracking emissions across a global portfolio.

The company rebranded to CoolPlanet in 2020. I joined in 2018, back when it was Crowley Carbon.

How the eight years played out

I joined CoolPlanet in 2018 as a junior developer. It was a career change for me, moving into software development full-time after years as a building services engineer. I was self-taught at that point, with an iOS app (Pocket Papers) and a few smaller projects behind me, and was partway through an HDip at NCI. That was enough for them to take a chance on me.

The initial focus was the back-end side of the platform: SkySpark, the time series database, and the calculations and data pipelines that sit underneath everything else. Over the next year or two I started moving up the stack and taking on more front-end work. Some of that was practical (there was always front-end work that needed picking up), but a lot of it was self-directed. I'd enjoyed building things that users actually interact with ever since the mobile work, and the front-end was where that itch got scratched.

When COVID hit in 2020, sites around the world ground to a halt and the business slowed along with most others. During that time the Bulgarian office shut down, and we lost the majority of our front-end expertise with it. The dev team had traditionally been split between Dublin and Sofia: architecture and back-end in Dublin, front-end and QA in Sofia. With just the Dublin team left, someone needed to step up and take on front-end ownership. That ended up being me, and I've been leaning further into front-end work ever since. I'd still consider myself a full-stack engineer with a good understanding across the whole surface, but front-end is where my expertise lives now.

When the business picked up again and sites started reopening, we needed to grow the team. This time we decided not to stand up a second dev office; everyone would be based out of Dublin and mostly remote, and we would hire full-stack engineers rather than splitting front-end and back-end. Building that team kicked off a long managerial arc, which I've written about separately on the engineering leadership page. The short version is that I did it for four years, learned a lot, and eventually hired my own replacement so I could move back to a purely technical role focused on the parts of the job I most enjoyed.

Over my eight years there I grew from junior developer to software architect, and ended up as one of the two most senior engineers reporting directly to the CTO. The projects and articles I've had time to write up are listed here. It isn't a greatest-hits list so much as the things I happened to sit down and write about.