Why I do this
I've spent two decades as the person who actually builds the thing. I went freelance in 2008, the year the App Store opened, and spent ten years making apps for the BBC, ESPN, Channel 4, Pearson and Novartis. I spent years working on Sworkit, a fitness app with 40 million downloads, and built their Apple Watch app. I also built and launched Mute, my own screen-time app, which the Guardian and Mashable wrote about. Somewhere in there I wrote a book about building iPhone apps.
Then agency life: Lead React Native Developer at Matchbox Mobile, building for AT&T, Microsoft and the AA. Then ASquared, a B Corp product agency here in Brighton, where I joined as a Lead Mobile Engineer and worked my way up to Director of Engineering and then Agency Director, owning the commercial and strategic side while we delivered for the likes of Butternut Box and Surfers Against Sewage. Running the business end of an agency is where I learned that the technical bit is rarely the hard bit. Understanding the business is.
Most recently I was Founding Lead Mobile Engineer at Ember, a VC-funded startup in London, shipping weekly. And that's where Claude changed what I thought a small team could do. I sat with a leadership team who weren't technical at all and watched them go from cautious to sending their own pull requests. Not because I built things for them, but because we built the tools together and I showed them how it worked. That's the bit that got me hooked, and it's why I started this.
How I work
Most AI consultants sell you a subscription or a training course, then leave. I do the opposite. I build AI into your real workflows, alongside you, and you come away owning it: no per-seat licence, no black box, no dependency on me. If I've done my job, you can run it without me, and you'll keep me around because you want to rather than because you're stuck.
Twenty years of shipping is also what stops this going wrong. There's a lot of AI that dazzles in a demo and falls over in the real world: spaghetti-code slop, accidentally deleted databases, tools nobody trusts enough to use. Knowing the difference is most of the job.
What I'm not
I'm not a strategist and I don't write readiness reports. I won't sell you a board deck about your AI transformation. I'm a builder: if you want someone hands-on-keyboard who can also hold a proper conversation about your P&L, that's me. If you want governance frameworks, there are firms who do that well and I'd happily point you at one.
Outside work
I'm in Brighton & Hove with my family. I play a lot of squash and a bit of padel, usually badly. I've got a drama degree, which explains rather a lot. I write about what I'm learning as I go, honestly, including the bits that don't work, over on the blog.
