In the early days of the web, which I was lucky to catch a glimpse of as a '96 baby, the internet felt like a patchwork of small personal spaces. People would craft their own 'corners' of it. It was messy, strange, colourful and unapologetically expressive.

Over time, much of that spirit was gradually smoothed away as sites became centralized, polished and well... boring. What was once a landscape of personal expression and niche communities with their own spaces became dominated by a handful of platforms shaping how everyone presents themselves.

This website is my small attempt to recapture a corner for myself.

My Story

My career as a software engineer began at 16 as an apprentice in the UK, where I built ASP .NET and SharePoint solutions for schools and colleges around the UK. I've been working ever since and as a result never attended university, opting instead for self-study alongside my work.

The interest I have in tech and software began around a decade before that first role and the first system I ever used extensively was a Windows 98SE based system with a Pentium II clocked at 400MHz and 128MB of system memory.

I was fascinated by the discs that you would get in magazines that came bundled with so much freeware and shareware, which led me to eventually download and use a tool called Game Maker, version 4.0 at the time. Young me naively wanted to build games like Pokemon, World of Warcraft and after what must be dozens of cold starts, I'd accumulated enough failures to become quite knowledgable about why that's quite the challenge!

Music was a passion for me too, discovering 'eJay' discs in cereal boxes and as a result becoming fascinated with music production and as an adult feeling quite at home with producing my own tracks.

Fast forward to now, turning 30 in 2026, my hobbies allow me the privilege of boredom being as scarce as time seems to be. I'm now a technical leader building and designing software that feels a lot closer in scale to those early MMORPGs I was fascinated by.

If at least one good discussion or inspiration comes of this little site, it's worth the effort.

Principles

• Write to think. The bits I write here are explorations, not proclamations, and they are just as much as for me to revisit and see how past me felt about a topic as they are for anyone else to gain insight or pick apart.
• Show the work! Experiments will include source, process, or at the very least, honest assessments of what worked and what didn't.
• Honesty. Time is scarce, and I do leverage AI alongside critical thinking and I'll always disclose when the latter is lacking.

Technical Stack

This website is a static site built with React, Vite, and MDX. Content is authored in .mdx files with frontmatter metadata. Layouts are selected automatically based on content type. A build-time manifest enables search and recommendations without a backend.

Contact

Reach out via email or find me on the usual platforms.