Engineering leadership for the real world
I have spent 30 years building things for the web — first as a developer, then as a technical director, and now as a VP leading engineering and architecture at scale.
These days I spend most of my time thinking about how teams actually work, why delivery systems fail, and why technology problems are almost never technology problems — they're almost always people, process, or time problems.
This site is where I collect practical thinking, opinions, and side projects in one place.
If you want the longer backstory, read more on the About me page.
Current focus
Right now I am thinking hard about how AI changes engineering organisations beyond the tooling layer.
That means looking at judgement, team structure, capability development, delivery pressure, and the uncomfortable fact that AI is moving faster than most organisations can adapt.
The interesting question is not simply how teams can ship faster with AI. It is how they can move faster without becoming more fragile or creating the kind of low-trust, high-debt systems that come back to bite them 6 months later.
We also need to consider the key leadership behaviours that either enable or undermine all of it.
If you lead engineering teams, think about how software gets built and shipped, or are trying to understand what AI actually changes about your organisation, you're probably in the right place.
Start here
The best place to start is the Thinking page, which brings together the themes I keep coming back to: speed, quality, judgement, capability, AI, and time.
Recent blog posts
Whose future is it anyway? (Part 3: From leverage to lock-in)
26 May 2026
AI starts as leverage, but may end as dependency. The real battleground is not capability, but control.
Whose future is it anyway? (Part 2: Who gets left behind?)
19 May 2026
AI does not arrive evenly. The countries and people without access to capability risk being excluded from the next economic model.
All change at the top as Labour shoots itself in the foot. Again.
15 May 2026
It looks like the Labour party is once again preparing to shoot itself in the foot, seemingly because the current Prime Minister is boring. Sadly the answer to pervasive, long-term policy challenges and a popularist party rising on the right is not to change leader every 3 years!
Whose future is it anyway? (Part 1: MAD, MAP, and the illusion of choice)
12 May 2026
AI could be as fundamentally transformative as the Industrial Revolution, but compressed into years rather than decades. The outcome is not predetermined, and it will not be evenly distributed.
Once upon a time, a decision was made
7 May 2026
Without deliberate context preservation, architecture decisions stop being history and start becoming folklore.