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13 Minutes… In 2018, I fulfilled a lifelong dream. On a family holiday to Florida and Maryland, we spent a day at the Kennedy Space Center. I stood underneath a Saturn V, saw the Space Shuttle Atlantis and got to see artefacts from the history of American space exploration. These were the very same things that I’d read about as a child and dreamed of seeing for almost forty years. I grew up…
Bring your own network Most of us have heard of bring your own device . We expect our laptops, phones and tablets to work wherever we are. But what if, instead of trusting somebody else’s network, you could simply take your own with you? That was the idea behind one of my more recent impulse purchases: the UniFi Travel Router (UTR). It doesn’t look particularly special. It’s a…
Powerless: the invisible foundations of modern life As I write this, the electricity supply to my home is switched off. Every few seconds, the house alarm lets out an apologetic beep. The electrician is outside, upgrading the communications module on my smart meter and installing an EV charging point. To do that, the house has to be without power for about 45 minutes. It shouldn’t make much…
Process debt: the hidden challenge in digital transformation A different kind of check-in A few weeks ago, I stayed at a large hotel that’s part of a well-known international chain. Before I arrived, I’d been encouraged to check in using the hotel’s app. That’s fairly common these days, so I didn’t think much of it. I assumed it would save me a minute or two before I…
CTO Corner (August 2026): Why flexibility has become a technology strategy If you spend enough time talking to technology leaders, a pattern begins to emerge. The conversation is becoming less about technology itself and more about the choices it enables A few years ago, many organisations were focused on cloud migration. Today, the discussion is broader. The questions I hear are about cost,…
LinkedIn is a network, not an audience I’ve been on LinkedIn for almost twenty years. I was one of the first million users in the UK. When I joined, it wasn’t a social media platform. It was a professional networking site where you kept in touch with colleagues, customers and people you’d met at conferences. If you changed jobs, LinkedIn helped you stay connected. Since then,…
For years, I had one simple rule for my home network: keep it simple. As our family’s dependence on reliable internet grew – for working from home, streaming TV, online gaming and, back then, homework – I deliberately removed complexity wherever I could. The old home servers disappeared. Exchange Server gave way to Microsoft 365. Files moved to OneDrive, with a Synology NAS providing local…
“Why am I paying a consultant for something AI can do in 15 minutes?” I’ve heard variations of that question several times over the past few months. On the face of it, it’s a perfectly reasonable one. Generative AI can draft documents, analyse data, write code and create presentations in a fraction of the time they once took. If the work now takes minutes instead of hours,…
Earlier today, I shared a post on LinkedIn after reading about The Port of Felixstowe expanding its autonomous truck fleet to 100 vehicles . I realised this isn’t really a story about ports. It’s a story about where autonomous driving delivers value first — and why that probably isn’t where most people are looking. Last year I wrote about software meeting steel : the idea that AI…
“It just needs to get me across France and back, and then I’ll replace it.” Those were my words after a rather large bill that sealed my Volvo V60’s fate. A few months ago, I wrote about the hidden cost of complexity in modern cars . I argued that today’s vehicles are increasingly defined by software, and that this complexity ultimately makes them more expensive to…