This blog has been around, in one form or another, since the late 2010s. It’s moved platforms, changed tone, and followed me through a few career pivots.

This is a place where I try to understand technology, systems, and how work actually gets done.

What this is

This blog has been around, in one form or another, since the late 2010s. It’s moved platforms, changed tone, and followed me through a few career pivots — but the core reason it exists hasn’t really changed.

This is a place where I try to understand technology, systems, and how work actually gets done.

  • Sometimes that means code.
  • Sometimes infrastructure.
  • Sometimes databases, process, delivery models, or the quiet friction that sits between teams.

The common thread is curiosity — and a preference for doing over theorising.

A bit of background

I’ve been building things on the web since the early days of having reliable internet access. Over the years that’s included:

  • flat HTML sites
  • PHP blogs
  • ASP.NET forums
  • React front ends
  • internal tools
  • legacy enterprise platforms
  • side projects that never saw daylight

Along the way I drifted from Network Administration into project management, then leadership roles, then back again — and eventually realised something fairly important:

I enjoy making and fixing things far more than I enjoy managing abstractions of them.

This blog is partly a record of that realisation.

How the blog evolved

The content here reflects where my attention has been over time — and, often, what I was wrestling with professionally.

  • Early blog posts
    Project management, security, and early machine learning curiosity. A lot of “trying to talk myself into enjoying this”.

  • Middle period
    Data analysis, Web3, and a growing interest in how systems behave at scale — technically and organisationally.

  • More recently
    Infrastructure, enterprise platforms, DevOps, delivery models, and the hidden cost of “simple” work. Less hype, more reality.

What’s changed most isn’t the technology — it’s the lens. I’m now far more interested in why systems behave the way they do than in just listing tools.

What I write about now

These days, posts generally fall into a few broad themes:

  • Systems & Delivery
    How organisations deliver work, where time really goes, and why friction appears where it does.

  • Infrastructure
    Linux, environments, platforms, cloud, and the bits that quietly make everything else possible.

  • Building Things
    Small tools, experiments, side projects, and occasionally real software.

  • Exploration
    New ideas, unfamiliar technologies, or areas I’m poking at without a clear outcome yet.

The categories are deliberately broad — the goal is clarity, not taxonomy perfection.

Comments & reactions

Comments are enabled on this site, but deliberately constrained.

In the past — particularly when this blog lived on WordPress — open comments attracted more spam, noise, and low-effort reactions than actual discussion. That experience took some of the joy out of writing, so for a while I turned comments off entirely.

These days, comments and reactions are handled via GitHub-backed discussions (using Giscus). That means:

  • you need a GitHub account to comment
  • reactions are lightweight and low-friction
  • moderation overhead is minimal

The barrier isn’t there to exclude people — it’s there to keep the signal-to-noise ratio sane.

Truthfully, there isn’t a huge amount of engagement, and that’s fine. This blog has never been about chasing comments or traffic. If someone finds a post useful and leaves a reaction, that’s enough. If someone wants to add context or correction via a comment, even better.

But the primary audience has always been me — thinking things through in public, without having to babysit the internet.

If you’d rather respond elsewhere, links to my GitHub and LinkedIn are below.

If you’re reading this

You probably found your way here via:

  • a specific technical problem
  • an enterprise platform that refuses to die
  • or a post that made you think “oh, that sounds familiar”

If so, you’re exactly the audience I had in mind.

This blog isn’t trying to impress. It’s trying to make sense of things.

Elsewhere

If you want to see what I’m building or working on outside this site:

This blog isn’t a finished product. Neither am I.