About

For twenty years before any of this, I worked in wildlife conservation and community development, most of it in South Africa. That work taught me the same lesson I now bring to every client: the thing someone asks for is rarely the thing they actually need.

The Knysna seahorse is endangered, and outside its own small estuary almost nobody had heard of it. The science behind protecting it was already understood. What was missing was something to make people care enough to act on it. So I built that instead: an aquarium, run as an NGO, with no funding and no experience running an aquarium. I rallied 36 local businesses behind it. WWF gave the project an Individuals in Action Award.

Around the same time, a Xhosa township music group had never performed outside South Africa. Talent wasn't the obstacle, access was. I organised and funded their first UK tour, and ran workshops with schools along the way.

Both came from the same instinct: find what's actually broken, then build whatever's missing, even if nobody asked you to and nothing like it existed yet. I pointed that same instinct at software a few years ago. The tools changed. The habit didn't.

Today that means building digital systems for startups and organisations doing work I believe in, mostly across the EU. The work is usually less about writing code on day one and more about figuring out what's actually needed first: the right foundations, the right architecture, sometimes just the right tools, before anything gets built at all.

I still choose my clients the same way. If there's no real good happening, for people, animals, or the planet, I'm not the right person for the job.

If that sounds like your project, tell me what's not working.