Clifton is the CTO at TES Global, a 100 year old educational publisher that is busy transforming itself into the largest online social network for teachers, providing tools and services that empower teachers to be better teachers across the globe.

TES Global (formerly TSL Education), is an educational publisher and service provider built out of what was the Times Educational Supplement (TES), the Times Higher Education (THE) and World University Rankings. The company was split off from News International in the early 2000's, and has since grown into the largest single online professional network on the planet with almost 6M teachers.

Our digital product is a typical mix of content and applications, which provide news, teaching jobs, teaching resources, teacher training, classroom products and forums, and like most publishers we are heavily reliant on SEO to drive new customer acquisition.

Clifton joined TES Global as CTO in May this year, with the fantastic challenge ahead of launching a new generation of products that support teachers across the planet and turning an educational publisher into an edtech business. To support this we have embarked on a journey of ripping apart the existing monolithic .NET application that powers the entire suite of products and rebuilding the lot using microservices.

He was previously the CTO at the MailOnline, one of the worlds largest online news sites, and helped to transform the entire technology platform, and culture, from a legacy monolithic java stack surrounded by fear into a fast moving micro service based platform built on top of NodeJS and Clojure and built on the foundations of programmer anarchy and freedom from fear.

Clifton still writes code, starting his journey with NodeJS by writing an open source CMS called Calipso a few years ago, as well as contributing to projects internally at TES whenever he gets the opportunity. At TES Global he is transforming the technology platform from a legacy monolithic .NET platform into another one based on micro services across a range of technologies, and is cooking up some novel micro service composition approaches that we will open source soon.