Stories
First-person pieces about specific builds, the people they were for, and what they taught me. Shorter. Usually personal.
- 918MB, an Ofsted inspection, and a governor who is not a developerMy kids school was rated Requires Improvement and facing re-inspection. The evidence base was 1,650 files and 918 megabytes. No governor was going to read all of it. So we built a tool that could.
- Building from my phone while watching the kidsThe five-step evolution of how I reach the development environment on the Mac Mini from an iPhone in a playground. The useful insight is that where you build shapes what you build.
- From model to agent: what changed when I stopped predicting and started investigatingWhy the regression models that came out of the hackathon got replaced within weeks by three agentic tools. The short version: probability scores without narrative are not what analysts need.
- One hour, one marketing listA vague ask ("give me a list of prospects that look like X") turned into a working pipeline across three data sources in under sixty minutes. A small build, but the speed is the point.
- The dragon my daughter designedMy seven-year-old had a specific game in mind. Sixty conversational turns later, it was playable on her iPad. A short story about the easiest, most rewarding build I have done.
- The hackathon that started it allA one-day hackathon in February 2026, a merchant-risk problem I had been looking at for a year, and a pipeline that scanned 30,000 websites in an afternoon. The origin of everything else on this site.