About
About me.
I'm a technical architect in Brooklyn, by way of Somerset. For twenty-six years I've built the layer underneath other people's software — the platforms, languages and primitives that decide how much a product team has to think about before they can ship something.
I didn't set out to specialize in that. I started in accounting and payroll software in the west of England, where the requirements are unglamorous and completely unforgiving: HMRC does not care that your architecture is elegant, only that the numbers are right and filed on time. I think that's where the habit came from. When the cost of being wrong is high, you stop reaching for clever and start reaching for simple, obvious and hard to misuse.
Everything since has been a variation on the same question: what's the smallest set of parts that can be combined into everything this product will ever need to do? Get that right and features stop being features — they become configurations. Get it wrong and every new requirement is a fresh negotiation with the codebase.
What I keep gravitating towards
Platforms rather than products. I like the problems that are one level beneath the thing the customer sees: how metadata resolves, how a customization survives an upgrade, how a date renders correctly for someone in Osaka without any engineer having thought about Osaka specifically.
Internationalization became a specialism partly by accident and partly because almost nobody wants it. It's the sort of work that's invisible when it's right and catastrophic when it's wrong, and it turns out I find that enormously satisfying. There's a particular pleasure in building the thing that means a colleague never has to learn what an ICU message format is.
A design isn't finished when it works. It's finished when someone else can use it without asking me anything.
Which is why a lot of my job has been workshops, reference material and sitting with teams while they try it — not because documentation is virtuous, but because an architecture only one person understands is a liability wearing a nice suit.
Previously Somerset before that.
How I work
Simple beats clever, every time
The measure of a design is how little of it you have to hold in your head. I'd rather ship the boring version that everyone can reason about than the ingenious one that only survives while I'm still here.
Ownership doesn't stop at the merge
If I designed it, I'm the one on the hook when it behaves oddly in production three years later. That knowledge changes what you build.
Teach it or it isn't real
Enablement is part of the work, not a chore after it. I've run more workshops than I can count and I'd do it again — watching someone use your thing badly is the fastest design feedback there is.
Approachable is a technical skill
People don't ask questions of architects they find intimidating, and the questions they don't ask become the defects you find later. Being easy to interrupt is load-bearing.
Away from the keyboard
I have a lot of Lego. More than is entirely reasonable — a lot of Star Wars and Batman themed, anything that looks good; until my adopted son decides to break it all apart! I'm aware of how neat it is that a man who spent his career on composable primitives spends his evenings clicking small parts together, and I've made my peace with it. I'm an inventor and prototyper at heart, and Lego has been an fundamentally important part of that since I was a child.
I'm also on the executive board of my son's school's extended day programme in Brooklyn, which is a great way to give back to the educators and team that teach and support the growth of our children daily. It's the same instinct as the workshops, really: most useful systems fail for boring organizational reasons rather than technical ones.
After setting up Lifion's first office in Bristol, UK — any many years of resisting the move — I finally left the sleepy Somerset countryside for hustle and bustle of New York City and never looked back. I love it here, and I love the people, culture and energy of Brooklyn; where I now call home. I have a lot of friends here, and a lot of work to do.
What's next
I'm looking for an architect or engineering role where the hard problems are structural — platform design, extensibility, developer experience, or internationalization that someone has finally decided to take seriously.
If that sounds like your problem, say hello.