I've had the pleasure to work with Simon for three years. One of Simon's greatest superpowers is his willingness to experiment, whilst working on multiple projects at the same time. He is a multitasker with a can-do attitude. His code contributions made a significant impact on the productivity of the entire software engineering team.

He can singlehandedly engineer a solution and sprinkle it with his great sense of humour. Simon would be a great addition to any dev team working on a complex piece of software.

We brought Simon in to help with some DevOps tasks at Poplar Studio which he delivered efficiently ahead of schedule, while also providing support to the rest of the team beyond the main scope of his contract. He worked effectively independently and collaborated with the team naturally through his friendly and relaxed nature as well. I'd happily work with Simon again.

Fantastic engineer and person. Very much enjoyed our technical discussions and personal chats. Would work together again in a heartbeat!

I was incredibly fortunate to work with Simon and would be excited to again.

Simon is:

• hilarious, but measured when needed
• warm, but stoic when required
• skilled, but humble when sharing
• a rarity, like a unicorn

I joined Gitpod as a senior software engineer in November of 2021. Simon was on my team, and adopted me as an onboarding buddy. He checked in with me daily, we talked about life, and he guided me while I learned the product and started my first couple assignments.

I felt like an integrated member of the team and company because of his effort and patience. He mentored me where I knew I was weak (docker and kubernetes and Linux), where I thought I was stronger (git), and when I was out of my comfort zone (GCP). I'm a better technologist because of him.

A few months later, the company reorganized itself, and Simon moved to a different team. We had less interactions, but what I saw is that he was consistent with his new team. He checked in with his team daily, offered help selflessly, and served where he could add the most value. This was critical because the team was small, we were integrating and extending the product, and new hires joining his team needed help learning the product to become productive.

How else is Simon fantastic? He gravitates towards ambassadorship. How? Here are a few examples:

1. He was a constant member of Gitpod's community, helping customers adopt Gitpod, learning about their needs, and incorporating that feedback into the installer. While doing so, he also built a strong relationship with the Community Team in Gitpod.
2. Gitpod has an installer component (to replace unwieldy Helm charts), and he wrote the lion's share of it. He shared how to use and extend it with the rest of product engineering, granting teams autonomy over the installation experience for their components. As part of the hand-over, he graciously offered office hours to aid in consulting.
3. You can even catch Simon sharing with the ecosystem about his experience with the Gitpod installer at Rejekts in Valencia at https://simonemms.com/speaking/.

If you'd like to schedule a live chat, book some time in his diary at https://calendly.com/simon-emms. You won't regret it. 👋@ Simon. 😀

I've worked with Simon both at the Energy Systems Catapult and on our own joint venture for a number of years.

On a personal level, Simon is a great friend. He is very astute, a good listener and communicator and it's a pleasure to be in his company. Simon speaks his mind with honesty and candour. He has often given of his time and experience to provide advice and help when I've needed it.

Professionally his can-do attitude has always ensured that work is delivered on-time and to the highest quality. Technically he is adept at working towards solutions to complex problems either alone or as a key part of a cross-functional team. With a wide range of skills and experience, I've always found that Simon will add value to any situation, project or relationship.

If you are looking for someone who can design, build, test and deploy working solutions as both a friend and a colleague, then look no further.

Simon is a fantastic engineer whom I first met and worked closely with while I was working at Replicated and he was working for Gitpod. Together we worked on a self-hosted installer for Gitpod. Simon is extremely technical, down to earth, and extremely funny. This combination of traits makes him a very effective technologist - he is able to clearly see the real problem to solve and is quick to create a solution. I would love to work alongside Simon anytime / anywhere.

Simon was an upstanding, helpful and inquisitive platform lead with Bohemia Interactive Simulations. During our time there, Simon helped steer and improvise changes to a Perforce-to-Git migration of a highly legacy software platform. His advisement on CI/CD, organization standards and policies, and his easy-going and approachable nature makes him a great candidate for leadership positions in organizations that wish to implement strategies for modern continuous integration. Simon possesses a wide array of skillsets in the DevOps, Platforms, Agile, hosting, cloud and administrative capabilities. I recommend any hiring manager give him a close look as he would make a valuable member of any creative team. Simon is also a beekeeper, and he expertly wears flat-caps, making him a stand-out candidate well worth the time to interview.

I worked with Simon for six months while he was Lead Developer at Bugfinders and during this I was not only impressed with his considerable knowledge of code and software, but also his ability to make the subject accessible to anyone that didn't have a background in programming. I rate Simon as a dependable, highly knowledgeable programmer. He's an affable individual and a pleasure to do business with.

Simon is equally skilled in both development and operational tasks, and I found I learned a great deal from reviewing his well tested code, from the documentation he provided, and from chatting with him and sharing ideas / approaches to problems.

Simon is dependable, trust worthy, very highly skilled and an all round really nice person who sincerely wants to deliver high quality software. A true asset to any team.

Simon and I worked together for several years. When I first joined the company he was my mentor to me as a junior software engineer and helped me to develop and enhance my skills quickly and efficiently. Largely this was achieved by teaching me higher level principles of software engineering, and then at the subtleties of the languages we worked in. Simon's extensive experience in the field of software engineering extends way beyond any single language or DB package and regularly, when we worked together, he demonstrated advanced knowledge of IT operation, building environments, CI/CD pipelines, commissioning cloud based resources and and database operations, etc. On top of this, Simon has a can do attitude and seeks to help the team wherever he can; which given his extensive toolkit, is pretty much everywhere. In summary, for anyone looking to recruit Simon, for whatever role you recruit him for, you'll receive a subset of, senior software engineer, an IT operations expert, a software architect, and a mentor, for free!

I watched Simon lead the development of one of our key product offerings at Gitpod, and it was really something! Simon is an outstanding technical leader with a deep passion for his work and an exceptional ability to connect with both engineering teams and users of the product.

I feel fortunate to have called Simon my colleague, and would jump at the next opportunity to do it again. Any team would be lucky to have him as a leader and collaborator​!

I worked closely with Simon for three years at the ESC where I was the test lead. I often sought Simon's help and advice where technical testing was required as this was not my strong point. Simon always took the time out to explain complex technical software in a way that I could understand and translate into test artifacts. His help was invaluable in setting up several test environments where he had to take time out from his own busy workload but he always did it with a smile and cheerful attitude. It was a pleasure to test any software that Simon was involved with as it was of a very high standard and made my job in testing easier.

I would love to have the opportunity to work with Simon again and would recommend him to any client looking for a hard working individual who brings a positive can do attitude to every project he is involved with.

Simon has always had a great reputation as an engineer & person and I have always enjoyed our no BS and honest chats the last few years. Our straight talking nature has made it a real pleasure to work with.

Always happy to share and take my advice (tells me if wrong) plus feedback from any process be that interviewing or interviewer has been stellar. Just an awesome person in the community.

I had the pleasure to work with Simon for almost a year at Gitpod. I have learned so much from him about work and life. He is a great engineer, who is very passionate about the work that he does and the technologies that he uses. He goes above and beyond in explaining things and making sure no one is blocked. A true team player!

Simon is one of the most caring and talented people I have ever worked with. I admire how upfront and honest he can be at all times. He is amazingly funny and full of encouragement. It has been an incredible honour working with him. He makes a great addition to any team he joins!

When I started working at the Energy Systems Catapult Simon immediately helped me in getting up to speed on the idiosyncrasies of the Home Energy System Gateway (HESG) and sharing his knowledge on the many technical and structural aspects of the system. A lot of the procedures and tools Simon wrote for HESG are still in use by the DevOps team now. Besides displaying an extensive technically knowledgeable Simon is a hands-on guy and also , above all, also a really nice guy. I've enjoyed many good stories on gardening antics and bee-keeping over lunch.

If you need somebody to be able to "think out of the box" and to "get the job done" then Simon is definitely the man for the job.

I have worked with Simon for a number of years at ESC and I cannot recommend him enough. He has a passion for well built software and will always go out his way to help every inch of software at your company, from supporting and improving legacy systems, integrating with IOT hardware to architecting new software solutions. He has a through understanding of full stack development, coding standards and modern theory and principles. Simon is the complete package if you're looking for someone to be at the forefront of your development team.