About
For work history and experience, see here →
Every family has that one person they lean on when technology goes wrong. Phones breaking, apps misbehaving, passwords forgotten, printers refusing to connect. That was me. It wasn't just technology either, really anything broken or annoying that needed figuring out. I was the one people called.
That instinct eventually led me to university, though not in a straight line. I'd worked a range of entry and mid-level jobs before that and never felt quite satisfied, never felt like I was really being tested. University gave me the freedom to play with technology properly, and a loose enough structure to learn at speed. I was already a voracious reader, had been since around 14, won some reading prize at 12 that I've since forgotten the name of, so the learning part came naturally. What university really gave me was permission to go deep.
What I noticed early on was that technology powers almost everything, but an enormous amount of it simply doesn't work. People don't shout when things work. They shout much louder when they don't. That's interesting from a technology perspective, but also from an operational and product perspective, terms I didn't have words for yet but had a feeling about from the start.
Now I love the whole process. Not just building, but the bit before it: taking a problem apart, turning it around, looking at it from different angles until something shifts. Lately that's been happening more at a company and industry level, which is even more interesting. Particularly in areas where everyone swears by a particular way of doing things but has never really questioned it down to brass tacks.
Featured
The Algorithm by Jon McNeil (Amazon bestseller, 2025), referencing the first product iteration I built at Zumi on page 46.
Diary of Humanity, a podcast I created and hosted.
DevLab Podcast, appeared as a guest.
Outside work
I read a lot. Biographies and history mostly, and more recently books on physics, economics, and information theory. You can see what I'm reading, have read, and want to read on Margins.
About 18 months ago I started running, which has been genuinely wonderful. Walks and hikes too. And I spend a fair amount of time just playing with technology, AI, code, hardware, mainly to see how things work rather than to build anything in particular.
Hobby projects
The Algorithm — Jon McNeill's book crystallised something I'd been trying to articulate for years: almost everyone starts at step three. They optimise things, or worse automate things, that shouldn't exist at all. The five-step framework he used at Tesla and Lyft forces you to question first, delete second, simplify third. I turned it into an AI skill — a prompt you can drop into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini — so the analytical heavy lifting happens fast and you can focus on context and judgment.
whenyoufree? — Group scheduling is broken in a way nobody seems bothered enough to fix properly. Share one link, everyone taps the dates they're free, green means go. No accounts, no apps, no back-and-forth. It's small, but people actually use it.
Don't Wait for Tomorrow — A life expectancy calculator that visualises how much time you have left and how you'll likely spend it, using mortality and time-use data by country. I built it for the same reason I try to read more and run more: the numbers are useful. Seeing the actual shape of your remaining time has a way of clarifying things.
PlanahShop — A small Etsy shop selling digital planners. Practical templates for people who like the physicality of planning but want something they can print, adjust, and reuse.