I needed somewhere to think.

🎧 Listen 4 min

AI feels like a fire hose now. What used to unfold over a year seems to happen in two or three months. New models, tools and ideas arrive so quickly that keeping up can feel impossible. The challenge is not just seeing what is new. It is finding enough room to process what has changed.

This site is where I slow things down, test what I am learning against two decades of building businesses and technology, and work out what is genuinely useful. If you are also trying to keep up without mistaking speed for progress, you may recognise the feeling.

I learn best by listening and by moving between audio, text and visuals, which is why each piece includes a way to listen. AI has opened up new ways to present the same idea around how different minds learn. Dan Koe inspired me to start writing, something I had never thought I was particularly good at. Jordi Visser showed me why it mattered. Writing could help me synthesise the ideas I was absorbing and work out what I actually thought.

That idea of beginning again mattered to me. We often build our identity around our work. When a career stops going to plan, rebuilding means more than finding another job. It means working out who you are without the role you thought you would keep.

I learned that when I left our family manufacturing business. I had trained as a civil engineer, but after more than a decade working in and eventually running the business, returning to civil engineering was no longer a viable option. For a while, I struggled to see where I belonged.

Technology offered a path forward, but it meant returning to university to retrain as a data scientist. I had little choice but to enter through graduate and junior roles, then work my way back up. Over the decade since, I have built production data and AI systems across startups, consulting firms, government agencies and regulated industries.

Technology gave me a path forward when I needed one. The decade since has made me practical about what makes a system useful. It is not enough for the technology to work. People need to understand it, trust it and fit it into the realities of their work.

That is the problem I work on now as an embedded AI and data engineer. Established organisations carry decades of hard-won knowledge, controls and compromises. The opportunity is not to sweep those things away with AI. It is to preserve what matters while improving how the work gets done.

I am naturally reserved. I am not someone who works a room at a networking event. I tend to sit back and listen. Find a shared interest, though, and people who know me will tell you I can be hard to stop. This site is a way to have more of those conversations, even if putting myself out there still makes me nervous.

Keeping every idea in my head has a cost too. Writing will give me a way to work out what I think, test it in public and learn from what comes back. I am not writing from the finish line. I am writing from the middle, with twenty years of lessons, current problems and a willingness to share what works, what fails and what changes my mind. This is where I make sense of my next chapter. You may find something useful for yours.