About
I've always needed to
know how things work.
Turns out, that's
a career plan.
I live in London with my wife and two kids. My life is largely an exercise in managing complex, unpredictable systems whether that's running a girls' football club, or debugging enterprise architecture on Tuesday afternoon.
Technology has never been a day job for me. It's a hobby. I run a home lab full of virtualisation, DNS ad blockers, and self-hosted AI models because I genuinely can't help it. I poke things to see how they work and more importantly, how they break.
That instinct is why my career has never gone in a straight line.
I started in Quality Assurance, which most people treat as somewhere to escape from as fast as possible. I stayed long enough to actually understand why things break and then automating the checks. Thinking about failure before it happens isn't pessimism. It's just engineering done honestly. That habit of understanding failure before celebrating success has followed me into every role since. From QA into software engineering, then cloud infrastructure, then consulting across a range of industries. Each move wasn't a step up a ladder. It was a deliberate step sideways to learn something I didn't know yet.
After enough delivery war rooms, the pattern becomes hard to ignore: the most expensive problems are almost always a gap in human understanding & communication and not a gap in technology.
This site is where I put what I wish someone had handed me earlier the fundamentals nobody teaches formally, the lessons that only come from making mistakes at scale, and an honest read on what AI actually means for the people building and maintaining the systems it runs on.
No paywall. No masterclass. Just notes, yours if you want it, for free.
The career hops
Quality Assurance
Every system has an edge case. The most dangerous assumption is that someone else already tested it.
Software Engineering
Building things taught me why they break. Reading other people's code taught me that clarity is an act of respect.
Cloud Infrastructure
Scale makes every bad decision louder. Good architecture is mostly just refusing to cut corners when nobody's watching.
Consulting
The job title changes. The problems don't. Organisations fail for human reasons. The technology is almost never the real issue.
Get in touch
Say hello.
If something here resonated, if you have a question, or if there's something you want explained, tell me. I take requests, and the good ones end up as a video.