My super powers

As VP of Research and Development I set the technical direction, decide what we build next, and keep a long-running financial website moving forward.

Before that I coordinated developers across the UK, Brazil and the USA, reviewed the code behind the core of the site, ran releases, and trained every new developer who joined.

You get better at what you do when you teach it. I led CoderDojo sessions in London for six and a half years, spoke for them abroad, and now co-organise freeCodeCamp London.

I have mentored Computer Science students at university and trained developers one to one, in person and online.

PHP is my home ground, from old procedural code to modern object-oriented applications, and I have built two PHP frameworks of my own. I also write JavaScript, TypeScript and Java.

I have built real-time tools on WebSockets that thousands of people use every day, and I make sure pages are fast, well structured and easy for search engines to understand.

A bug? Let me get my tools. Most of my favourite days start with a slow page or a strange error and end with the cause, not a workaround.

Profiling requests and JavaScript, caching the right things, rewriting the query that holds everything up: the browser's developer tools are the tool I could not live without.

I have run web servers for well over ten years: from FTP-only hosting and cPanel to Linux virtual private servers, mostly Debian and Ubuntu on a LEMP stack.

These days I would rather not run a server at all: this site is static and served from Cloudflare's edge.

Security is part of the job, not a later step: threat modelling, sensible access control, and defaults that fail closed.

This site, for one, loads nothing from other domains and runs under a strict Content Security Policy.

I build with AI agents: tooling, automation and workflows that take the busywork off a team, with people still making the calls that matter.

The interesting part is knowing where they genuinely help, and where a plain script does the job better.

I like building PCs, fixing things and playing with the cameras and sensors in the phones we carry around. I have published a few mobile apps along the way.

Have a cool app idea, or a PC that will not boot? Let me know.