From the trenches: Rachel Laycock

Rachel Laycock is the chief technology officer for North America at ThoughtWorks, where she’s accountable for driving technology strategy and defining areas of focus for the North American business, steering technical capabilities and solutions, and serving as a conduit between global leadership and technology teams on the ground. She’s worked on a wide range of technologies and the integration of many disparate systems and advises clients on technology strategy and identifying and prioritizing technical trends and solutions. She has many years of experience coaching organizations on Agile and continuous delivery technical practices at scale. She’s a member of the technical advisory board to the global CTO, which regularly produces the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. Her ultimate passion is problem-solving and in her 16+ years of delivering software has discovered that people challenges are often more difficult to solve than software ones.

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Neal Ford is a director, software architect, and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy that thinks disruptively to deliver technology to address the toughest challenges, all while seeking to revolutionize the IT industry and create positive social change. Neal focuses on designing and building large-scale enterprise applications. He’s an internationally recognized expert on software development and delivery, especially in the intersection of Agile engineering techniques and software architecture. Neal has authored magazine articles, seven books (and counting), and dozens of video presentations and has spoken at hundreds of developers conferences worldwide on the topics of software architecture, continuous delivery, functional programming, and cutting-edge software innovations. Check out his website at Nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

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