Geek, beer brewer, cabinet maker, DIY guru and dad Link to heading

Work Link to heading

My primary skill in the tech world is knowing enough about a lot to fix the toughest problems with an ability to dive into detail where needed. I will find creative ways to solve business challenges, perhaps exemplified in the implementation if John Lewis’s click and collect service. Everyone said it can’t be done in the timescale and without extensive code changes. I found ways to get it working with almost no code change and making use of existing tooling. It ran like that for several years.

My main love on the tech side is building high performance data-centric applications or using data to drive transformational growth. Even more than this I am passionate about making an environment so that people in my team can build brilliant systems, be that through direction, mentoring or simply giving space to thrive.

As the technology switches from hands-on software development to spec driven agentic development I am well placed as the skills to manage mixed off and onshore teams are remarkably similar to managing a collection of agents. Provide detaild requirements, standards, deal with poor performance (refine claude.md), split work into managable chunks, instil QA practises and conduct code reviews. The differences being that AI agent management happens much faster and AI agents don’t want to go for a drink at the end of the day.

Home Link to heading

With a couple of kids there is limited time in my life for other activities but when not taxiing them around or kicking a ball about I will be found on a project around the home. I might be found putting up a fence or building a wall, perhaps changing a bathroom or adding a new socket. When all of the jobs are done I enjoy the great outdoors, woodwork and brewing beer. Brewing is heavily process driven and woodwork is more like an agile project with clear goals but short sprints with detailed, refined objectives. I do a fair amount of hacking about on personal project. Rapidly building almost production ready applications in a matter of days. Github Spec Kit is keeping me busy this week.