This blog is what happens when lifelong geekery collides with a desire to give something genuinely useful back to the world. It’s part curiosity, part craft—and part “surely someone else will find this interesting too.”
If you’d like to connect with me or see the professional version of this chaos:
Like most people, I work because life isn’t free, and I wasn’t born into a trust fund. I’ve been lucky enough to spend my career in great places, solving big problems, and learning from brilliant people. But a few years ago, I realised something uncomfortable: my architecture role, good as it was, used only a fraction of the skills I’d spent a lifetime building. That itch eventually pushed me into the world of AI, where I could finally blend strategy, engineering, and hands‑on building again.
My love of coding started early. I was nine, armed with a Tandy TRS-80 (which I still own and treasure), writing B.A.S.I.C and teaching myself Z-80 assembler because… why not. By my teens, I’d built a BASIC compiler, a Forth compiler, tape drivers, and a small mountain of other experiments. I hacked and cheated games for magazines (below), but my favourite memory is reverse‑engineering CP/M security at school, bypassing the login system and unhashing the password file from binary patterns. Self‑modifying code was a thing back then, and using the refresh register felt like wizardry… right up until the MONA3 debugger ruined the fun by preserving it during single‑step.
Let’s just say there wasn’t much I couldn’t hack. Hacking college took a single lesson, after modifying the “boot-disk”.
Fortunately for my criminal record, dial‑up wasn’t widespread in the UK during my early adult years. Otherwise, curiosity might have led me somewhere… educational. I’m fascinated by the idea of alien cover‑ups, but not enough to test HM Prison hospitality.
Z‑80 assembler still lives rent‑free in my head: 0xc9 return, 0xcd call, 0x11 load DE, 0x01 load BC… some things never leave you.
My favourite programming language of all time, yes, really, is ColdFusion. I spent 11 years building enterprise web applications with it, backed by large Oracle databases, and I loved every minute. A close second is Borland Delphi (Pascal), followed by Clipper. I’ve written plenty of C and x86 assembler, too, though these days I avoid them like the plague. And here I am making AI examples in C# – I guess I’ve grown to love that too.
A few developer pet peeves for good measure, those who…:
- think testing by them is optional
- refuse to write comments because “the code is obvious”. Spoiler: it never is.
This blog is a place to share what I’ve learned, what I’m building, and the odd war story from decades of engineering. If it helps someone else, or at least entertains them, then it’s doing its job.