Twenty years experience in software engineering. This is where I write about technology, building things, and whatever's caught my attention.
There's a livestream running of a humanoid robot sorting packages. It picks packages off a chute on its left, orients them label-down, and pushes them onto a conveyor belt on its right. Over and over. Twenty-four hours a day. It's fascinating! The robot is called Figure 03. It's impressive in ways that are hard to convey without watching it. It stands on its own two legs. It keeps it self stable…
It's so god damn tempting to use AI to write. Whether it is articles, code, or documents. I feel like using AI is diminishing my ability to write myself. I didn't necessarily feel I was bad at writing. I used to be a somewhat talented...well...mediocre software developer, but now, the more I use AI, the more I can feel my own skills getting worse. I think the problem feeds on my self-doubt, my…
I've been distro-hopping for probably twenty years. Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Arch, and most recently Fedora with KDE Plasma. Every time I install Linux I feel a small swell of optimism, like this time it'll stick. However, every time I go back to Windows I feel relieved that I can use my computer properly again. Linux never sticks with me. I idolise Linux and the people who use it. High…
I’ve spent the last decade (or two) trying to write on a blog while also building the perfect blog. Those are two different hobbies and I’ve been treating them like one. As a software developer who loves the small web , privacy, and self‑hosting, it always felt right to run my own stack. In practice, it meant I shipped fewer posts and more tweaks. The tinkering trap Give me knobs and I’ll turn…
Express is a small experiment I led to make hiring tradespeople simple, fast, and trustworthy. The idea was straightforward: let homeowners book and pay for small jobs instantly, with clear prices and no waiting for quotes. We launched in one city, learned quickly, and then expanded. At its heart, the problem wasn’t “search” but translation. People say things like “my tap’s leaking” or “can…
There’s a quiet trap in modern engineering culture: the belief that maturity comes from infrastructure sophistication. You start with a few microservices, then a platform team, then centralized Terraform, Kubernetes, Backstage, and a layer of automations on top. Before long, it feels like you’ve arrived. You’ve built a “serious engineering organisation.” The problem is that these systems are…
The story of building Home Health, a web app where homeowners upload photos and get AI-powered home improvement suggestions. From ChatGPT experiment to production app.
When I joined my current organisation, the engineering architecture was mid-transformation; shutting down a heritage system, introducing new platforms, and experimenting with AI. It sounded exciting, and it was, but it was also messy, uncertain, and at times overwhelming. What I’ve learned since is that transformation isn’t just about upgrading technology. It’s about learning how much change your…
This year I inherited Checkatrade’s long-running ‘Heritage Switch Off’ project. All previous attempts had stalled, the supporting documentation was scattered to the wind, and all past contributors had left. The stakeholders offered me a bold suggestion: failure-driven migration. Flip the off-switch and fix whatever breaks. I had to make the tough call to take the harder, more time-consuming path.…