Plays with tech.
The project: Clann (Irish for family), a self-hosted family tree app. One Docker container, one SQLite file, your data on your own hardware. The experiment: if AI does nearly all the engineering, what’s left of the product job? The itch I wanted a family tree that belonged to my family: private, self-owned, off the subscription […]
Role: Product Lead Context: Preparing a learning platform for a second product, and a second kind of user The problem For years, the SocialTalent home page had one job: get learners into learning. It did that job adequately, but it hadn’t been meaningfully updated in years and it looked like it. More importantly, the platform […]
Role: Product Lead, from design through beta to commercial launch Scale: The biggest and most collaborative project of my career so far, spanning every function in the company, none of which reported to me Timeline: Design began early 2025, GTM enablement in late 2025, market announcement and sales begin in early 2026. The problem Companies […]
Role: Product Lead, end-to-end, from concept through beta to GA launch Impact: 100,000+ activities completed in the first year; adopted at scale by some of the world’s largest enterprises The problem Anyone involved in hiring – recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers – learns their hardest skills on the job, with real candidates as the practice material. […]
Role: Product Lead, designed and ran the beta end to end The subject: SocialTalent’s AI-powered practice activities, tested with 172 learners across 16 customer companies in June and July 2024 Why the beta mattered more than usual For a conventional feature, a beta answers “does it work?” For an AI product in 2024, it had […]
Role: Product Lead for the accessibility compliance programme, from first customer requirement to full conformance Timeline: Work began in 2024 with full EU Accessibility Act compliance by the beginning of 2026 The problem In 2024, two of our largest enterprise customers, Accenture and Siemens, raised accessibility requirements. It was one of the first times a […]
After a couple years of use from my old Raspberry Pi x OpenWRT Travel Router, it was time to upgrade. The brief was pretty simple – it has to be smaller, faster, based on a Raspberry Pi and most importantly, simpler so there will be no oled display or soldering required to build this one. […]
Here’s my story about migrating my media from Plex to Jellyfin. A few weeks ago Plex published a blog post which announced two big changes – a big price increase for their Plex Pass and remote streaming will become a paid feature. While many users were happy support the future of Plex by paying for […]
Update June 2025: I’ve made further updates to resolve the PSRAM and rmt_channel issues. The config should work withou any mods now 🙂 Update November 2024: I have made some updates to the ESPHome .yaml config in an attempt to reduce static noise on the speaker output that some makers have reported. It’s hard to […]
Last year (2023) was Home Assistant’s Year of the Voice so I thought there’d be no better way to start 2024 than by building my own Home Assistant powered smart speaker. It’s based on an ESP32 Lyrat dev board which doesn’t seem to be widely available so you can grab one on Aliexpress (affiliate link) […]