About me

I started programming at twelve because I was bored with the games I was playing. I spent two years learning C++ to build my own: a Dwarf Fortress with far fewer features and a lot more crashes. It barely worked, and I loved trying to make it work. That impulse, picking something I do not understand and refusing to stop until I do, has not really gone away.

The professional version of that started at Albelli. The Solution Architect on my team showed me how much there was to learn and how little I knew, and somehow made that exciting rather than demoralising. He taught me that thinking you already know everything is the moment you stop being a good engineer. Five years there shaped how I work more than any single project since.

After Albelli I spent two years at Rangle, consulting across very different clients and getting a much wider sample of how organisations actually function under pressure: what survives contact with production and what only ever existed in the slide deck.

At Storyteq I have moved into the Principal Engineer role: less code written by me directly, more time spent with the people writing it, and more decisions about where the platform as a whole is going. It is a different kind of work, but the underlying job, understanding the system well enough to make a defensible call, is the same one I have been doing since I was twelve.

I am at my best when the problem is messy, ambiguous, and important enough that a clean answer does not exist yet. Give me a tidy ticket with one right answer and someone else will do it faster; give me something tangled that nobody quite owns and I will be useful for a long time.

When a problem grips me, I go deep. I like understanding not just the symptom, but the structure underneath it. That usually means I will ask more questions than feels strictly necessary before I commit to a direction, and then move quickly once the direction is clear.

I try to be direct in conversations and explicit about trade-offs. If I think a plan has a real risk, I will say so plainly; if I am the one who got something wrong, I would rather name it than route around it. The teams I have worked best with are the ones where that is just how everyone talks.

Outside work I am usually with my fiancé and our small zoo: three dogs and two cats who have firm opinions about whose chair is whose. They keep the house loud and the days structured.

I read a lot of fiction. Fantasy mostly (Hobb, Pratchett, GRRM, currently working through Sanderson's Mistborn), and a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle.

On the side I have been spending time in low-level programming (Rust, Zig, C) building small compilers and game engines from scratch.

I still play OSRS.

I lift. After a couple of less active years I am getting back into proper shape.