I got into technology because I liked understanding how complicated systems worked, then making them a bit less mysterious.
For a long time I thought the systems I cared about were technical ones. Cloud platforms. Data pipelines. Architecture. Distributed systems.
The more organisations I've worked in, the more obvious it has become that those are only part of the picture.
The really interesting systems are the organisations around the technology: how decisions get made, how trust gets built, why good engineering sometimes disappears into the background, and why talented people can still struggle when they are all looking at different maps.
I've spent the last decade building and rebuilding data platforms across healthcare, education, fintech and energy.
Along the way I've cut infrastructure costs by 75%, rescued platforms that were creaking under their own weight, consolidated hundreds of databases into modern analytics platforms and led engineering teams through uncomfortable periods of change.
Those outcomes matter. What I find myself thinking about afterwards is why they worked.
Technology rarely fixes an organisation by itself. The better work is understanding the place well enough to know what needs changing, what needs protecting, and what everyone has quietly learned to work around.
Sometimes leadership means adding structure. Sometimes it means removing it. Sometimes it means slowing a team down long enough for them to regain confidence. Sometimes it means helping an organisation move before it talks itself out of moving.
That is the work I keep finding my way back to.
This website isn't really a portfolio.
It's a place to collect the lessons I don't want to forget: the useful ones, the awkward ones, and the ones I only understood after getting them wrong first.
If anything here resonates with your own experience, I'd love to hear from you.
Outside work, I play solo acoustic gigs around South Yorkshire, get out walking in the Peaks or the Dales whenever life allows, and spend a lot of time being brought back down to earth by my two daughters.
I started in technology entirely self-taught: Python, SQL, machine learning fundamentals, data warehousing. I still like going back to fundamentals, whether that's maths, modelling, architecture or how teams actually learn. Most of the hard problems seem to become easier when the basics are properly understood.