Andy Normington

Senior Embedded Software Engineer

Focusrite

About Me

I work across Focusrite and Novation. Embedded systems are my technical home, but much of my day job happens between teams: improving the tools and workflows that help engineers get products out of the door, shaping our shared engineering platform and helping teams get the most from it, and turning security and architecture challenges into practical ways forward. I enjoy joining the dots, sharing what works, and making the next team’s path a little less bumpy. I came to software engineering through music and audio, via electronics, and I’m still curious about what happens when software meets the real world, which has a habit of ignoring the diagram.

Sessions

  • Show Your Working

    Useful Before it's Finished
    12:20 - 12:50 UTC | Wednesday 11th November 2026 | Bristol 2
    Beginner
    Intermediate
    Advanced

    Writing documentation can be a chore, so why are we suddenly keen to write instructions for Claude? Perhaps it helps that we're already in our editor, rough bullet points will do, and the payoff is immediate: our tools work better for us. Meanwhile, useful explanations disappear into chat histories, and half-formed ideas stay private while colleagues work through the same problems. What can writing for machines teach us about sharing our thinking and finding people to think it through with? Taking a few detours through Alexander Graham Bell's experiments with sound and Delia Derbyshire's working tapes, we'll explore what happens […]

  • Working With the Garage Door Up

    Letting Others Take a Look Before You’re Ready
    19:50 - 20:10 UTC | Friday 26th September 2025 | ADCx Gather
    Beginner
    Intermediate

    This talk is about working in the open in your day-to-day in a development team. Sharing early - whether it’s a rough idea, a half-written doc, or a messy prototype - can lead to fast feedback from people you might not expect, useful conversations, and even collaborators. We know the value of sharing early versions of products with customers to get feedback: we should bring that same spirit to our day-to-day technical work, too. Have you ever crafted a detailed answer to a teammate's question and then buried it in your chat history? Or kept some half-baked solution thoughts to […]