I've been building for the web since the early 1990s: some of the UK's first e-commerce sites, secure card payments before HTTPS was standardised, realtime ski results for the World Ski Federation in 1996. The three decades since have run through start-ups, scale-ups and global organisations, scaling teams, modernising systems older than the people maintaining them and dealing with the consequences of decisions that didn't age well. These days I lead engineering organisations, and I still build things, mainly because it keeps my opinions about trade-offs honest.
I care about systems that hold up under real pressure, the load a codebase puts on the people working in it, and the long tail of technical and organisational decisions. AI is part of my daily work; I measure what it does rather than take its word for it.
I write at Real World Engineering about engineering leadership, system failures and what happens to software engineering when code gets cheap. Latest essay: The governor and the stoker, on what we measured when coding agents were left to judge for themselves whether process was worth applying. They skipped it exactly when it mattered.
- SDLC Studio – an open-source skill that runs the software delivery lifecycle inside an AI coding agent: specifications, planning, verification and independent review, enforced by deterministic gates. MIT licensed, with published benchmarks.
- SDLC Studio Lens – a dashboard for visualising SDLC Studio project specifications.
- HomelabCmd – self-hosted homelab monitoring and management, with automated remediation behind an approval workflow.
- 3D Shooter – a Unity project built to understand game loops and rendering from first principles.
- micro-wake-word-models – custom microWakeWord models for ESPHome voice assistants.
This space is a working notebook, not a curated portfolio.