A long way of saying I like making things
The longer version of the two sentences on the homepage — where I came from, what I keep coming back to, and why any of this is here at all.
I grew up in a house where things were always being taken apart. My dad fixed his own cars badly and his own radios well, and the kitchen table was usually covered in whatever he was halfway through. I don’t remember being taught that you were allowed to open things up and see how they worked — it just never occurred to me that you weren’t.
That’s most of the through-line, if there is one. I’ve wanted to be a few different things — for a while a marine biologist, briefly and embarrassingly a stockbroker, for one intense summer a bread baker — and the only constant was that I wanted to make the thing myself and understand the inside of it. Software was the version of that with the shortest gap between an idea and a working version of the idea, so I kept doing software.
I moved to Sydney at nineteen and the city did the thing cities do to you at nineteen — it made the world feel large and reachable at once. I started running because it was the cheapest way to see all of it, and the running quietly turned into the other half of my life. There is a particular clarity to hour four of a long run that I have never found anywhere else, and a lot of what I think I believe got decided out on those trails rather than at any desk.
These days the making mostly looks like building with AI — tools that let software do real work without a person holding its hand the whole way. It’s the most interesting problem I’ve had, partly because so little of it is settled, and partly because the hard parts turn out to be old human questions wearing new clothes: what should something be trusted to do on its own, and how do you know when it’s wrong.
The cooking is the counterweight. Code either runs or it doesn’t; a loaf of bread is never quite finished arguing with you. I like having one thing in my life that rewards patience over cleverness, and that I will never fully master, and that I can hand to other people at the end.
I started this site because the things I was learning were disappearing the moment I learned them.
Which is the real reason for all of this. I’m not trying to build an audience or a personal brand; I’m trying to keep the good stuff from leaking out. Writing forces me to actually finish a thought, and putting it somewhere public — even somewhere this quiet — makes me finish it honestly. If a few of these pieces are useful to someone else, that’s a happy accident on top of the main thing.
What’s here will drift. In a year I might be writing about something I haven’t even heard of yet, and I’d like that to be fine — the homepage is just a list, in the order things happened, with no promises about what comes next. If you want the short version of what I’m up to right now, that lives on the Now page. If you want to say something, I’d genuinely like that.