Since 2008 I’ve mostly been the person in the room saying “we could just build that”.

Started at Bedford College in 2006, then got headhunted into the industry building websites by 2008. I spent the first twelve years writing code — front end, back end, infrastructure, security, whatever the job needed — before the title changed: Technology Director, then Chief Technology Officer in the learning industry, and now Head of IT across a healthcare group covering more than seventy clinics and NHS-affiliated services. These days the job is cyber security, information governance, DSPT, Cyber Essentials Plus, acquisitions, budget ownership and service delivery as much as it's technology — strategy and compliance most days, hands on keyboard some evenings (best part, and always will be, THE PEOPLE). I still write code most evenings and weekends. Nobody's stopped me yet.

My brain is essentially a never-ending queue of ideas, observations, and moments where I think: “that could be automated,” “we could build a solution for that,” or “why are we paying for this when we could make it ourselves?” I struggle to leave a problem unsolved once I've noticed it — ADHD, if you want the clinical word for it; product development, if you want mine. Whether it's a workflow, an integration, a dashboard, or a small tool, most projects start the same way: spotting friction, questioning the status quo, and imagining a better way to do it. The ideas pile up, get rearranged, and occasionally turn into something people actually use.

I like people too, which sounds like CV filler until you see why it matters. The problems worth solving rarely arrive in a requirements document. They become apparent when someone walks you through their week and you notice the same task being repeated over and over, or a workaround so old that nobody remembers what it's working around. People only share that kind of insight when they're comfortable.

Outside work I'm Dad. Four kids, so the house is rarely quiet and the family calendar is basically a competitive sport. That's how Family Hub started. Whatever time is left goes on football, something with an engine, gaming, or a keyboard.

The tools I build get made in those gaps. Some fix things I've run into myself. Others exist because somebody described their week to me and I couldn't leave the problem alone. Everything started as an idea, mashed into shape.

Somebody, somewhere, is doing this by hand right now and has stopped noticing.

There's a serious point underneath all that. Budgets are tighter than they used to be, teams are smaller, and the industry's answer has mostly been to increase the per-seat price. I'd rather build the thing that actually fits and price it so cost isn't the reason somebody goes without. Not charity. Just a better deal. A tool built for a real job is the one people are still opening in two years.