About us

Quinn's story

Fish Percolator’s services are delivered by Quinn Daley and associates. Quinn is a software engineering leader with 20+ years of industry experience.

Tech credentials

Fish Percolator under Quinn’s leadership has built over a dozen SaaS applications from scratch, including our own name.pn, and success stories like Digital Urban, Noiiz and Improve Your Accent.
Quinn has been responsible for the architectures of several huge-scale web applications in their long career.
They introduced a devops culture to Citizens Advice, making reliability, cyber security, disaster recovery and performance everyone’s concern.
They are recognised as a contributor to the open source community, including code in Ruby on Rails itself.

From 2021-2024, Quinn led the software engineering team at Citizens Advice, a team of 40+ engineers working across 11 multidisciplinary product teams.
During that time, they transformed the team from a collection of development silos with very high staff turnover into a true community of practice where people were collaborating across teams, staff attrition was very low, and product teams were taking ownership of (and interest in!) their own production deployments.
More recently, they worked with British Red Cross on taking a demotivated and stalled team into one doing regular meaningful releases and where people were excited to come into work.
Quinn has upskilled many non-engineer startup founders into understanding their codebases, test automation and maintenance of production environments.
Earlier in their career, Quinn managed a UK development outpost for multinational Trend Micro.
And they have extensive chairing and facilitation from their volunteer life, including a stint chairing a local political party, as well as chairing the Pride Place committee and founding/co-organising Yorkshire O.P.E.N for over a decade.

Quinn takes the following approaches to leadership:

Person-centred: Every individual has different strengths, motivations and desires. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to building a productive team, and the only way to do this effectively is by getting to know people individually.
Community-building: Community runs as a thread through everything Quinn does. Building strong, supportive communities is the most effective way to get any cultural or process changes to stick, and to ensuring people feel excited to come to work.
Inclusive: It’s not enough to have a diverse team - people have to feel they belong and their contributions are valued. Quinn has lived experience of trans/queer marginalisation, autism and mental health and is able to draw on the experiences of associates with other experience.
Informed: Quinn’s methodology is completely bespoke with every project, but it builds on the work of many others, including the original Agile Aliance, Nancy Kline and Marshall Rosenberg.
Positive: People are great. Teams are great. Even in bleak times, there is a bright future we can work together to build.
Silly: You’ll spend many meetings wondering what that picture of a duck had to do with anything, and I guarantee you’ll know more about Kate Bush by the time our first project is over.