I make useful software.
Then I get carried away.

I started out building PHP-based web applications and CMS platforms. It was my way into professional software development rather than the technology that came to define my career.

I moved into the Microsoft/.NET world relatively early and have spent most of my career there, building everything from business applications and internal platforms to large, interconnected systems that businesses depend on every day. Over the years that expanded well beyond writing software into architecture, infrastructure, networks, security, technical leadership and, increasingly, product development.

At WageDayAdvance I became IT Director while the business was scaling at serious speed. The company reached No. 8 in The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 ↗ — the ranking of Britain’s fastest-growing private technology companies. At that pace, technology couldn’t simply support the business. It had to anticipate where the business was going and be ready before it got there.

I’ve led large technical teams, but I’ve always preferred staying close to the technology. I’ve designed and built bespoke in-house platforms, operational systems, integrations and much of the less glamorous machinery that businesses quietly depend on — the things nobody talks about until they stop working and suddenly become the most important system in the building.

That has included being hands-on with virtualised clusters, servers, networks and major infrastructure projects as well as software architecture. I’ve never particularly liked the idea that becoming an architect means eventually graduating from actually building things. A diagram is useful. Knowing whether the thing on the diagram will actually work is rather more useful.

I’ve also headed responses to ransomware and other serious security incidents. Those situations have a habit of stripping technology back to fundamentals very quickly: understand what’s actually happening, contain it, make sensible decisions with incomplete information, protect what still works and get the business safely moving again.

Today I’m back where I’m happiest: building things. My own stack has settled around .NET/C#, Vue.js and modern web technologies, with whatever databases, infrastructure, cloud services and AI tooling make sense for the problem. I’m particularly interested in the point where software engineering, AI and automation meet — not AI for the sake of putting an AI button on something, but using it where it genuinely changes what software can do.

After more than two decades in technology, I’ve been a developer, architect, infrastructure engineer, technical leader and director. These days the title matters considerably less to me than the problem.

I’m an entrepreneur by nature, but probably a problem solver first. Give me something difficult, messy or apparently impossible and my instinct is still the same as when I first started writing software: take it apart, understand how it works, and figure out a better way to build it.