Hi, I'm Melinda!

It's always hard to write a page about yourself. How do you highlight your entire career on a single page? I've had several past lives: I've been an engineering manager, a software engineer, a conference speaker, a tech event organiser, a blogger and a startup founder. If you want to find out more about those, scroll on down.

I now work with teams and individuals to help them share what they know with others. I help teams build their external reputation, making it easier to hire and retain people. Part of that is designing and delivering custom workshops, as well as doing individual 1:1 coaching and feedback sessions.

I'm available for workshops, coaching, consulting work and speaking gigs. If you're interested in finding out more about how we could work together, reach out to me at melinda@seckington.com.

More about me

I’ve been a conference speaker myself for almost 10 years (next year will be my 10th anniversary!), but I used to be TERRIFIED of public speaking. I’ve since then developed a lot of material to help others get into public speaking, and I love seeing new speakers grow their skills and confidence.

I got into all of this because I used to be both a blogger (writing about movies, gadgets, and all things geeky at MissGeeky) and an event organiser (at Geeks of London, where I used to run meet-ups, unconferences and hackathons for the London tech community including the 500 person Hacked in 2014 at the O2).

When I joined FutureLearn as an engineer in 2013, I realised our team should be sharing what we were doing with the community, and I could help them through my past experiences! I kept on leading on evangelism and outreach when I switched to doing engineering management, and I feel these activities complement each other: it’s all about helping people to grow and encouraging them to learn from and share with others. I've now got over 10 years of experience working with and managing teams of developers & managers and helping them with their evangelism and outreach.

Even more about me

My tech story starts back in 2002 when I decided to do computer science. I loved movies and video games (I still do!) and at the time I thought doing computer science would be my best bet to either end up creating movies or games. So after high school, I enrolled in Computer Science at the Delft University of Technology.

I ended up doing my Masters there, specializing in human-computer interaction, educational software and artificial intelligence. It’s a bit of a weird mix, but that was in part cause during that period together with friends, I built a free online learning platform. We started our own company called Ed-me to work with lecturers to create content for the platform. The startup failed for a variety of reasons (one being that this was 2005 and online video streaming wasn't a problem we wanted to deal with. Keep in mind YouTube wasn't even properly around then!), but it gave me an early experience of having my own startup.

After that, I switched my focus to AI where I could combine my interests of psychology and tech: my master's thesis was on facial expression recognition, understanding how people express spontaneous and fake emotions differently and building a system that could differentiate between the two. 

While I was doing this research, my professor at the time moved to London, and asked if I was interested in doing a 1 year exchange here. I’m not sure whether without that I would have moved to London, but this gave me a chance to do it for a year. I’m still here, so you can tell how that plan to do a single year worked out.