The 2000s were a crazy time, fonts were small, flash was cool and I was doing freelance work, so I needed a site, now I'm stuck with it. Anyway, these days I'm a Head of Engineering, I lead teams, I build things.

I'm an engineer. I grew up around tractors, studied electronics, and ended up in software. The tools changed but the thinking didn't. Twenty-something years in, I've spent that time building software and the teams that build software, from scrappy startup projects to leading engineering organisations across multiple teams and managers. Banking, e-commerce, travel, media, healthcare: different domains, same core problems. Unclear ownership, fragile deployments, teams and businesses that don't quite speak the same language.

So I fix that stuff first. And I need to know it's working. That means caring about measurement: how fast are we shipping, how often are we breaking things, are the team's goals actually connected to what the business needs. Not because I enjoy dashboards, but because without that shared picture you're all just hoping.

When you get it right, when the team has clear ownership and everyone speaks the same language, when engineers understand why they're building something and the business trusts the people building it, something changes. You stop firefighting and start making good decisions. People start to enjoy it again. And this is supposed to be fun, right?

When I'm not at a keyboard, I'm playing bass in an eight-piece ska band, or in the workshop making something with my hands.