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The first computer I ever owned arrived second-hand, passed down from my grandfather. He was a professor of civil and aeronautical engineering, a brilliant man who had a profound understanding of physics, mathematics and computers. The machine he gave me wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t new, but it was mine, and when it eventually caught a virus, my whole life changed direction.
I wanted to understand how something invisible could break something physical. When I discovered that a computer virus was simply a program, lines of instructions written by a person to do exactly what they intended, the mystery collapsed into something better: a craft.
In the twenty-odd years since I pulled that thread, I’ve taught myself to code by breaking things down to first principles, built websites for neighbours, designed systems that now run inside military bases, hospitals and prisons, and now work with some of the most influential organisations on Earth to launch their biggest ideas.
I tell you that story because it explains why this website exists, and why I think it matters that it does.
The internet I grew up on
The internet I fell in love with was a strange, generous place. It was full of people writing because they had something to say. Personal sites, forums, long rambling tutorials written by engineers at two in the morning, published for no reason other than the hope that someone, somewhere, might find them useful. That internet taught me my trade. I owe my career to strangers who took the time to write things down.
Somewhere along the way, that internet got quieter, and a louder one grew over the top of it. Today, nearly everything you read online has been engineered to capture you. Headlines are written to provoke rather than inform. Feeds are ranked by what keeps you scrolling, not by what’s true or useful or kind. Opinions are manufactured at industrial scale, optimised for outrage, and pushed at you by systems that know your habits better than you do.
I don’t say this as a bystander. I build software for a living. I understand, in intimate technical detail, how attention is captured, measured and sold. That knowledge is precisely why I’ve decided to carve out a space that works differently.
A place that doesn’t want anything from you
This website has no algorithm deciding what you see, and no advertiser or growth target lurking behind the words. It’s a personal site in the oldest sense: a place where one person thinks out loud, and you’re welcome to listen or wander off as you please.
That might sound quaint. I’d argue it’s becoming radical.
When everyone is fighting for your attention, the most respectful thing I can do is not fight for it at all. I’d rather earn it slowly, the way trust is actually earnt, by being useful and honest and willing to say “I don’t know” when I don’t. The web needs fewer hot takes and more warm ones: opinions that have been carried around for a while, turned over, tested against real systems and real consequences, and offered with the humility of someone who has been wrong before and expects to be wrong again.
Why my opinion, of all opinions?
A fair question. The internet isn’t short of people with opinions about software.
The obvious answer is that I’ve spent two decades building things that had to work. I mean systems that people in critical environments depend on rather than demos or slideware: systems that survive bad networks and worse assumptions, and that are still running in production years after I wrote them. I’ve collaborated on some of the most ambitious, largest-scale projects I could have hoped to touch, alongside some of the sharpest people in the industry. I’ve shaped engineering standards, influenced who gets hired, and mentored people who’ve gone on to outgrow me, which, I’ve learnt, is rather the point.
But none of that is the qualification I’d actually put forward, and it certainly isn’t a certificate (I’ve never held one). The qualification is time.
Most opinions about building software are written by people who never have to live with them. A pattern gets advocated, a framework gets crowned, an architecture gets declared correct, and the author moves on long before the bill arrives. I’ve never had that luxury, and I stopped wanting it a long time ago. Everything I build, I build knowing it will outlast my involvement. In five or six years someone else will open that code, or I’ll open it myself sitting beside people who weren’t there for a single one of the original decisions, and it will have to explain itself without me in the room.
That one thought changes everything about how you work. It makes you ask the awkward question at the start, when it’s cheap and unwelcome, rather than at the end when it’s expensive and unavoidable. It makes you choose boring technology that simply works over the interesting thing that would look better in a conference talk, and solve the problem actually in front of you, reasoned from first principles, rather than the more flattering one sitting next to it. And it makes you write abstractions clean enough to explain themselves to a stranger, years later, at two in the morning.
None of that is glamorous. It’s a slow, faintly furious discipline built on simplicity and a refusal to stop asking questions until the problem is genuinely understood. It’s also the reason the systems I’ve worked on tend not to get rewritten. They’re still running, still doing the job they were built for, because they were designed right at the beginning rather than rescued heroically at the end.
That’s the only kind of expertise I’ve come to trust: the kind that has been audited by time and consequence. It can’t be faked and it can’t be shortcut, and it tends to leave you with fewer strong opinions than you started with, held rather more carefully. Which is, I think, exactly what a useful opinion looks like, and exactly what’s in short supply on an internet that pays by the certainty.
That’s what shapes how I write here. Rather than performing expertise, I want to share what twenty years of building things has actually taught me, including the failures, the dead ends and the opinions I’ve had to abandon. If you’ve ever felt that the loudest voices online rarely seem to be the ones doing the work, this site is my small attempt at restoring the balance.
Thinking in public
There’s a selfish reason for this space too, and I’d be lying by omission if I didn’t admit it: writing is how I think.
Every engineer knows the experience of explaining a problem to a colleague and solving it mid-sentence. Writing is that, sustained. When I sit down to explain why an architecture worked or why a decision haunted me, I discover what I actually believe, and often, that it’s not quite what I thought I believed. Publishing those thoughts raises the stakes just enough to keep me honest.
So this blog will be a working notebook as much as a publication. Expect pieces on software engineering, building systems that endure, learning without credentials and the strange, wonderful business of turning curiosity into a career. Expect some pieces about life too, because I’ve never managed to keep things separate.
An invitation
I’m not going to ask you to subscribe, follow, like or share. If something here proves useful to you, that’s the whole transaction, complete in itself, the way it was on the internet I grew up on.
What I will do is make you a promise. Everything published here will be written by me, thought through as carefully as I can manage, and offered in good faith. When I’m confident, I’ll say so and show my working. When I’m speculating, I’ll label it. When I’m wrong, and I will be, I’ll correct it in the open.
That’s the whole pitch: one person, twenty years at the keyboard, a hand-me-down computer that caught a virus, and a quiet corner of a loud internet.
Pull up a chair. I’m glad you’re here ❤️