About - Rob Watts

Hi, I’m Rob Watts 👋

You’ve found yourself on my personal site. This is where I keep public notes and blog posts.

Here’s a page on my background if you want to know more about me.

Some posts contain pearls of wisdom I learned from some great people I have been lucky enough to know and work with. I always cite the original author when I knowingly do this. But please Contact me if you see something that’s yours!

I’m learning all the time. The contents in any post may well have changed in my mind since I wrote it. I might go back and update but I probably won’t. Being wrong or misinformed at some point in time should be a given. The only person I aim to please on the internet is myself.

I write using Obsidian and appreciate the community who have inspired me enough to create my own detailed notes and every so often publish one of them here.

Wonderbly

I am CTO at Wonderbly.

I help run the business with the other execs and CEO. I look after the techology organisation and help guide three multi-disciplinary squads inside Wonderbly. We are forever improving the our machine to bring our amazingly personalised products to ever more people.

I love working here. You probably would too. Of course, we’re hiring.

Previous tech jobs include:

2014-2016 Chief Software Architect at MTT, a provider of apps and products for the travel industry. I led the design and development of their award-winning product suite. I was heavily involved in the successful acquisition of MTT by Travelport.
2008-2014 Technical Lead at Wiley while living in NYC for 6 years, I worked for Wiley on initiatives for their science and learning platforms such as OnlineLibrary and WileyPlus. I helped with the Frommer’s acquisition by Google.
2003-2008 Lead Developer at Whatsonwhen Prior to to Wiley in NYC I worked at a travel startup called Whatsonwhen, leading a small but awesome dev team. In the end, we were acquired by Wiley as part of their Frommer’s business.
2000-2003 CTO & co-founder at Weather Index, a Web 1.0 start-up. We raised some cash and tried to make it work. It was fun, I’ll tell you about it one day.