Engineering notebook
Most of my projects begin with a question.
Sometimes it starts with a problem that keeps getting in the way. Sometimes it is a technology I want to understand properly. Occasionally it is a slightly unreasonable idea that I cannot leave alone until I have built enough of it to find out whether it works.
This is where I document those experiments: what prompted them, what I tried, what failed, what changed my mind and what I learned along the way.
These projects span product engineering, AI, knowledge graphs, games, systems programming and a few ideas that probably should have remained safely theoretical.
They are connected less by technology than by the way they started: I noticed something, wondered whether it could work differently and built enough to find out.
What would engineering delivery look like if AI was designed into the workflow from the beginning?
An attempt to rethink tools such as Jira and Azure DevOps around engineering flow, context and agent-assisted work rather than adding AI as a feature afterwards.
2023 – Present
What if history could be explored as a connected temporal system rather than a collection of separate articles?
A project that began with a simple request for a more joined-up way to explore history and grew into a temporal knowledge graph and mobile application.
2022 – Present
Can a small set of mechanics produce a mobile rogue-like game that is simple, fair and difficult to put down?
A mobile game experiment focused on pacing, replayability and the uncomfortable discovery that balancing a simple game is not simple at all.
2021
What might the web look like if protocols, identity and data rights were redesigned today?
A speculative systems project exploring Rust, new protocol ideas, distributed trust and a different relationship between people and their data.
2019 – Present
Can symbolic reasoning, generative models and agents become more capable when they are designed to work together?
An evolving symbolic-AI experiment with its own language and command-line environment, shaped by physics simulations and an unhealthy tolerance for letting software modify itself.
2023 – Present
I am usually at my best when the answer is not obvious yet.
I like taking a loose problem, turning it into something testable and building the first working version. That might mean a technical spike, a reference implementation, a reusable platform component or a small tool that removes friction for everyone else.
I have led engineering teams, but I have always remained hands-on. I enjoy moving between product questions, architecture, application code, cloud infrastructure and whatever unfamiliar area the problem happens to require.
I learn by building, and I build because I am curious.
A changing list of things I am pulling apart, joining together or attempting to understand properly.
Some of these projects have public repositories. Others are private, incomplete or contain work that needs a guided explanation to be useful.
Where I can share source code, I will. Where I cannot, I will show the decisions, diagrams, prototypes and lessons that explain the engineering behind it.