About

Hi.

For this site, I have decided to take the bold step of using my old fashioned biological hardware for the words that you are reading.

For the youngsters, I am using my fingers to write on a keyboard to create words that I've chosen myself. I realise that may lose me a certain amount of aura, but I'm locked-in and, at the time of writing this, I did weigh up this decision 6 or 7 times ;)

A little about me professionally

I enjoy wearing several hats.

I mainly work in senior technical leadership roles, usually somewhere between architecture and CTO, currently as CTO of The Injenio Circle. I have never stopped designing and building. I code every day, and for the past few decades I've held myself to a minimum of four hours of study or research daily.

Before I worked fully in tech, I ran some successful businesses, held management positions in banking and insurance, and did some government work. That experience taught me to always maintain a commercially focused perspective, and it has shaped my career.

I have endless areas of interest across technology and physics and, a few years ago, largely for fun, I trained and qualified as an electrical engineer and electrical tester.

I’ve worked at companies of various sizes over the years, either directly or as a contractor/consultant.

Each size company comes with its own unique characteristics and challenges. For example, a budget limitation in an SME is just as exciting a challenge to meet as creating systems that can handle billions of requests at low latency. Part of the role of a CTO or architect is finding the optimum within practical restraints. These challenges are a real driver for me, I love them.

On AI

I've spent years building production systems with LLMs at the coal face, burning through billions of tokens on complex tasks. I have a lot of experience and a lot of thoughts which I’ll share through my writing.

At a high level, I think where we have got to with AI is incredible. I see the opportunities it can provide, I see the damage it may well do, and the various paths this technology could take.

I’m not an alarmist, and I’m not interested in catchy sound-bites. My observations are boringly real-world. No hype, no sales, I just genuinely have very deep experience in this area and I know what works, what doesn’t, and how it can easily trick people into thinking it is working when it isn’t.

On neurodiversity

I have a deep interest in neurodiversity, and I'll be writing a lot about it from different angles on this site.

What to expect from this site

I’ll be writing a lot about the important things we are all facing as tech leaders and business leaders.

It will be opinionated, and I will almost certainly say things that are not always swimming happily alongside the current tech zeitgeist.

I also reserve the right to change my mind on approaches, opinions, and technical application as I learn more or the landscape changes.

I am an architect, not a brick wall 😊