We recently announced the winners of our inaugural Human Made Awards. Of all the categories we celebrated, there’s one we wanted to come back to and give a little more space: Technical Wizardry, won this year by Samantha Miller.

Technical excellence sits right at the heart of what we do at Human Made. It’s why our clients trust us with business-critical projects, and it references the standard our team holds itself to every day.

So when we asked everyone at the company to nominate the Human whose technical skill, problem-solving, and craft had set a new bar this year, it was a meaningful question. And Sam’s name came through loud and clear.

We caught up with Sam to talk about the award, the work, and what she’d say to other women weighing up engineering as a career.

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How did it feel to win the Technical Wizardry award?

“I was completely shocked. I work with some of the most talented people in the industry, so to be recognised by my peers at a leading agency has genuinely blown me away. I’m incredibly proud, and if I’m honest, I’m still getting my head around it!”

What do you love most about what you do?

“I work on projects for a range of clients, and they all bring their own unique challenges that require creative technical thinking. I’m constantly learning, and that keeps things exciting.

“I love working with clients, understanding what they really need and finding the right solutions for them. I take a lot of pride in my work. I’m meticulous about the small details, because I think that’s what turns good work into great work. That craft and care really matters to me. I also love working at Human Made, and that makes a huge difference.”

What are some of your favourite projects you’ve worked on recently?

“Skyscanner Travel Trends 2026 was a highlight. I was the technical lead and worked closely with Skyscanner’s design team to realise their creative vision. I loved the technical challenge of building a scalable frontend that had to be dynamic, visually engaging and carefully crafted, while also being flexible and intuitive for editors. It’s the kind of project where the details really matter, and that’s where I do my best work.”

“AI is an area I’ve been working in a lot recently and find really intriguing. Last year I spoke at our WP:25 event about a project I led with AGBI, where we embedded AI into their editorial workflow to generate and refine content summaries for editors to review and publish. More recently I’ve led projects building tools that reframe existing content, using AI to show users only what’s most relevant to them. For me, AI is a tool to enhance what people can do, not a solution in itself. Keeping people at the heart of what we do is what matters.”

What advice would you give women looking to build a career in web development?

“Be curious and do what you enjoy. Seek out people to learn from at your local meetups, conferences and online. Share what you learn – there will always be something you know that others don’t. Take up opportunities and put yourself forward, even if you don’t feel ready. You have more to offer than you realise.”

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Engineering at Human Made

We want Human Made to be a company where engineers from every background can thrive, feel genuinely recognised, and be proud of where they work.

Women are still massively under-represented in web development. And we would like to do our bit to change this. If you’re a developer thinking about your next move — and especially if you’ve ever been made to think engineering wasn’t a space for you — we’d love to hear from you.

Congratulations again to Sam, and thank you for everything you bring to the team.

The post Awards Spotlight: Technical Wizardry appeared first on Human Made.

As a globally distributed company, our work typically happens across time zones, async, on video calls, and in pull requests. We love working this way; it means we can build the best teams possible. But it does come at the expense of face-to-face time with other Humans.

That’s why our annual company-wide retreat is always such a highlight. Just before the sun sets on this year’s retreat, we’d like to take a minute to celebrate the winners of our inaugural Human Made Awards.

We asked everyone at Human Made to nominate the people they felt deserved recognition across eight categories. The response was incredible. The nominations told stories of generosity, technical ability, passion, craft, quiet brilliance, and the kind of everyday excellence that doesn’t always show up in a project retrospective.

The gongs were dished out at a glittering ceremony out at sea off the coast in Brela, Croatia, a couple of weeks ago.

Tom Willmot, Human Made CEO, said:

“The awards were such a great addition to our retreat. The ceremony itself was filled with emotion, gratitude, love, and tears! It’s powerful to be recognised by peers you respect, and rewarding to endorse someone publicly.

“Congratulations to each of the deserving winners (listed below) and thank you to everyone who took part. I think these will be a regular feature from now on”.

Culture Champion
Recognising someone who lives our values, brings people together, and helps make Human Made the kind of place people want to work.

Winner: Zoe Hoyle

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Technical Wizardry
For the person whose technical skill, problem-solving, or engineering craft has set a new bar this year.

Winner: Sam Miller

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Biggest Cheerleader
For the colleague who consistently lifts others up, celebrates wins big and small, and brings warmth and encouragement to the team.

Winner: Vojislav Vlasic

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Client Whisperer
For the person who builds exceptional relationships with the clients we partner with — turning trust into long-term success.

Winner: Sarah Jones

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Behind the Scenes
For the unsung hero whose work keeps everything running — often without anyone realising just how much they do.

Winner: Fatima Rampurawala

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Leadership Impact
For the person whose leadership — whether formal or informal — has had a real, positive impact on the people around them this year.

Winner: Adam Brown

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Creative Spark
For the person bringing fresh ideas, original thinking, and a bit of magic to their work.

Winner: Pawel Mikolajek

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Human Made Hero
Our headline award. For the person who, more than anyone this year, has embodied what it means to be part of Human Made.

Joint winners: Hannah Terrill and Jenny Wong

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Awards like these aren’t really about trophies and acceptance speeches. They’re about creating space for us all to appreciate the amazing work our colleagues do throughout the year.

Human Made is built on the belief that people bring the heart to the technology we build, and these awards provide a small way of allowing us all to celebrate exactly this.

They serve as a reminder of the brilliant people we work with, the amazing work we do for our clients and the fun we have along the way.

Congratulations to all our winners and nominees and thank you to everyone at Human Made for being part of what makes this company so unique.

The post The Human Made Awards 2026 appeared first on Human Made.

It had been nearly two years since we were last on retreat together in Greece, which, in a company like ours, feels like a very long time.

Last week, we brought Human Made back together again, this time on the Croatian coast, surrounded by mountains, sea air, and the kind of setting that invites both reflection and energy in equal measure. As a remote company, these moments are not incidental to how we work, they are fundamental to it, giving us the opportunity to reconnect in ways that simply are not possible through a screen and to strengthen the relationships that sustain us throughout the rest of the year.

There is always a moment, usually quite early on, where you can feel the shift happen, where conversations begin to flow more easily, where familiarity replaces distance, and where the company, which normally exists across time zones and Slack threads, becomes something tangible again.

Ready, steady, Croatia!

Bringing a global team together in one place is no small undertaking, and it takes a remarkable amount of coordination, care, and attention to detail to make it happen in a way that feels effortless once we arrive.

I want to start by recognising everyone who contributed to making this retreat possible – in particular our retreat organisers Zoe, Leyla, Hannah, and Fatima – because events like this do not come together by accident, and the experience we all had last week is the result of a huge amount of unseen work.

What continues to stand out to me each time we do this is just how quickly people settle into being together, how conversations that might take weeks to unfold remotely instead happen within minutes, and how connections form naturally across teams, disciplines, and experiences.

There is a sense of ease that emerges, and with it, a level of understanding and collaboration that carries forward long after the retreat itself has ended.

Finding our retreat flow

Every retreat develops its own character, shaped as much by the people as by the moment we find ourselves in as a company, and in Croatia there was a clear sense of exploration running throughout the week.

This year, that exploration centred around AI, not just as a topic, but as something actively being tested, questioned, and understood across the entire organisation. What was particularly striking was the breadth of experience, from those in the agency who are already deeply embedded in using these tools to reshape their work, to those who are only just beginning to understand what might be possible.

What was encouraging, and genuinely exciting, was how quickly that gap began to close once we were all in the same space.

People shared openly, demonstrated how they approach problems, and helped each other unlock new ways of thinking about their day-to-day work, often in ways that felt immediately practical rather than theoretical. You could see confidence building in real time, not just within engineering, but across every discipline, as people realised that these tools are not confined to one role or one way of working.

The AI hackathon we ran across part of the week brought all of this together in a way that felt both energising and revealing, as teams formed around ideas, experimented freely, and pushed into new territory without the expectation that everything needed to be fully formed or successful.

What mattered was the willingness to engage, to try, and to learn from each other, because that is ultimately where meaningful progress begins.

The value of being together

We often talk about the benefits of being a remote-first company, and there are many, but being together in person serves as a powerful reminder of what underpins all of it.

There is a natural flow to in-person conversation that is difficult to replicate elsewhere, where ideas evolve more quickly, context is shared more easily, and collaboration becomes something dynamic rather than structured. More than that, it allows people to understand each other beyond their roles, to build trust, and to develop the kind of relationships that make working together not just more effective, but more enjoyable.

That sense of connection is not something that stays behind when the retreat ends, it becomes part of how we work moving forward, shaping the way we communicate, collaborate, and support each other throughout the year.

The moments that matter

Alongside the work, there were countless moments that captured the spirit of what these retreats are about, from shared meals and late-night conversations to the energy of a pub quiz, the celebration of HM’s birthday out on the water, and the quieter interactions that often leave the most lasting impression.

There were people stepping outside their comfort zones, others discovering new confidence in sharing their ideas, and many simply enjoying the opportunity to spend time together in a way that is rarely possible in our day-to-day work.

These moments may seem small in isolation, but collectively they form the foundation of our culture, not as something defined in words, but as something experienced and carried forward by everyone who is part of it.

Looking ahead

Each time we come together, I’m reminded of what makes Human Made what it is, which is not just the work we do, but the way in which we approach it, with openness, curiosity, and a genuine willingness to learn from one another.

Croatia gave us the space to reconnect, to explore new ideas, and to strengthen the relationships that make our work possible, and it is that combination that continues to define us as a company.

Thank you to everyone who made it what it was.

Now we take that shared experience, that energy, and that momentum, and carry it forward into everything that comes next.

The post Human Made retreat roundup – Croatia 2026 🇭🇷 appeared first on Human Made.

When the Human Made team set out to redesign and relaunch our own website earlier this year, we had two main goals: to create a faster, more flexible experience for visitors, and to give our content and design team more control over managing the site and how it evolves.

We didn’t want to over-engineer it.

As a WordPress agency known for building enterprise-level sites, it can be tempting to create everything from scratch with a custom build. But sometimes, the best engineering choice is to use what already works. The Ollie Pro theme, built entirely with Full Site Editing (FSE) in mind, offered the right balance between solid foundations and creative flexibility.

Since launching, we’ve not only used Ollie for our own site but also introduced it to several client projects — proving that you don’t always need a “from the ground up” custom build to deliver a beautiful, performant site.

Here are five things we achieved in the process.

1. A flexible foundation built for modern workflows

One of the first things we noticed was how easy it is to maintain a consistent visual style across the entire site. Ollie’s extensive pattern library helped make it easy to build pages efficiently whilst keeping your branding and site design consistent across pages.

For example, instead of manually setting font sizes or margins in individual blocks, we can adjust them once – globally – and know every page, post, and template will follow suit. This makes maintaining a site both faster and more consistent. 

Ollie isn’t trying to reinvent WordPress, and that’s exactly why we like it.

It’s designed to complement core FSE functionality, providing a well-structured starting point that works seamlessly with patterns, templates, and style variations. This helped us move quickly in the early stages of the redesign while maintaining full creative control.

“Ollie gives us a solid foundation to build from without getting in the way. It’s flexible enough for developers, but also intuitive for content teams.” – Pawel Mikolajek, Designer at Human Made

2. Design consistency, without custom CSS

Using Block Editor’s global styles and Ollie’s extensive pattern library, we could easily apply consistent typography, colour, and spacing across every part of the site — no repetitive adjustments, or extra CSS.

Instead of reinventing components, we built upon existing patterns, tailoring them to match our refreshed visual identity. This made the process both faster and more maintainable.

“As an engineering focused agency it’s easy to over-engineer our personal website and end up not meeting the needs of our marketing team. I think using Ollie has been really successful in allowing our marketing team to have consistency and become more efficient” – Matthew Haines-Young, Engineering Manager at Human Made

3. Complete control with Full Site Editing

One of the biggest wins of the redesign has been how much ownership our marketing and content team now has over the site.

Combining the Ollie theme and FSE features, we can customise menu headers, footers, and templates directly in the Site Editor, without writing a single line of PHP. Updating the navigation no longer requires developer input now that we’re utilising the simple UI of Ollie’s Menu Designer — something our team really appreciates.

4. Built-in responsiveness that works

Ollie’s responsive design system, including advanced column controls and flexible, mix and match styles, mean our landing pages have a seamless experience across devices from day one.

Rather than manually managing breakpoints, the theme’s defaults work hand-in-hand with FSE’s layout tools. The result: a site that feels polished and balanced on every screen size, without the need for additional CSS.

5. Increased performance

Utilising FSE features mixed with Ollie’s easy to use style patterns and theme, we’re able to keep our site lightweight and performant. No heavy frameworks, no redundant scripts — just clean, efficient code.

That simplicity translates to faster load times, improved accessibility, and easier long-term maintenance. It’s a reminder that future-ready doesn’t have to mean complex, sometimes it’s about choosing tools that evolve alongside the platform.

Our site now loads faster, uses fewer dependencies, and performs more consistently across devices. Combined with modern image handling and efficient markup, the result is a noticeably smoother user experience — both for visitors and for our content editors working in the backend.

Final thoughts

For us, using Ollie wasn’t about taking shortcuts, it was about working smarter.

Using the theme allowed us to focus on what really matters: great content, solid performance, and a design system that can grow with us. More importantly, it’s a testament to how powerful Full Site Editing has become, giving teams the tools to build beautiful, consistent, and flexible websites using the core WordPress experience.

As early adopters of FSE, we’re excited to keep exploring how themes like Ollie can help our clients do the same: move faster, collaborate better, and make WordPress work harder for them.

Explore the benefits of WordPress Full Site Editing and how we use it for client projects.

The post Building smarter, not harder: Why we embraced FSE for our own website redesign appeared first on Human Made.