Selected Work
A few projects, systems, and lines of exploration that say something about how I work and what I care about.
B2B Insurance Quoting
One of the most important systems I worked on was an early B2B insurance quoting platform. It sat at the intersection of real commercial need, system design, and practical delivery.
What mattered was not just getting software written, but creating something reliable enough to support business use and flexible enough to evolve.
Programming Language Design
At one stage I designed and implemented a programming language. Not simply software written in an existing language, but a language of my own.
That kind of work changes how you think. It forces clarity around syntax, semantics, structure, and the relationship between ideas and implementation.
AI and Machine Learning Experiments
I explored AI and machine learning in the 1980s and 1990s, long before the current wave of interest. Those experiments were early, practical, and often constrained by the limits of the time, which made them interesting in their own right.
What stayed with me was not hype, but curiosity: what machines can infer, how systems can adapt, and where real usefulness begins.
Security and Identity
More recently I’ve been experimenting with post-quantum encryption and passwordless authentication. These are not just fashionable topics; they are part of a broader interest in how systems remain trustworthy, usable, and resilient as the technical landscape changes.
Practical Software
Alongside the more unusual work, I’ve also spent a great deal of time building practical software: systems that need to work, be understood, and remain supportable over time.
That includes projects such as the aviation booking system and small experiments like Planetoid, where the emphasis is on simplicity, usefulness, and learning through iteration.
Ongoing Themes
- clear system design
- practical delivery
- cost-aware architecture
- experimentation with purpose
- technology that solves real problems