A bit about me

I didn't take the usual route. After school I trained as a bicycle mechanic. In 2016 I was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma and spent a big chunk of the next few years in hospital, including a stem cell transplant in 2018.

Once I was better I went back to bikes for a while, but I wanted a change. I'd always been into games and building my own PC, so in 2020 I did the Northcoders bootcamp. I've written more about that here.

My first job was at Silverchip in Manchester, where I spent three years on web and mobile projects, including an online banking app. In 2023 I moved to The Distance in York and worked mostly on React Native apps for their clients.

Agencies are a good place to learn quickly. You see a lot of different codebases, a lot of different clients and a lot of deadlines.

I'm a tech lead at Hunter Healthcare, working in healthcare software.

BEACON helps healthcare providers benchmark against international peers and learn from each other. More on Hunter's website.

I'd rather use simple, well-understood tools than whatever's newest, especially when a small team has to look after the result.

I use AI tools every day and I've written a fair bit about them. They're genuinely useful, but I still want someone on the team to understand and review what actually ships.

I've worked hands-on with SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and GDPR, mostly from the engineering side of things.

That experience covers access control, audit logs, encryption, how changes get reviewed and deployed, and gathering evidence that an auditor can follow. I can help other teams with this too.