About
How I work.
I trained as an accountant and spent four years in insurance, investment accounting and risk. What kept pulling me away from the ledger was everyone else’s problem. I followed that work through Parity, the Starknet Foundation and Chainlabs, and started building the tools myself because waiting was slower.
A loop, not a ladder
Listen, audit, ask, build, kill.
Built with other people. Credited that way.
Building with AI
AI helps. I make sure I understand it.
I build with AI coding agents, and it is easy to prompt your way to something that works without understanding it. I do not want to be that person, so I work two ways, and the point of both is to understand what is happening under the hood.
Production: agents write, I review
The tooling the vertical runs on is written with agents and ships through the same pull-request workflow and CI/CD as everyone else’s code: reviewed, deployed, monitored. I am responsible for every line that goes in, whoever typed it, so I read it before it ships.
Learning: I type, the AI coaches
When the point is to own the code, the roles flip. I type every line; the AI explains, reviews and fixes, and does not write it for me. Slower, and the only way I can honestly explain it to someone else.
Teach-back, then break it
Five minutes after every session: what we built, why, and what broke, in my words. That becomes the decision record in the repo. Then a fault goes in on purpose and I find it without help, because troubleshooting is the skill that building through an assistant does not practise.
I do not have a computer science degree or engineering certifications, and I would like both. Until I can, this is how I keep hold of what gets built and understand it, rather than letting the models run the whole thing.
Teams
Operations built with every function.
Finance
- The payout pipeline and fee tracker, with the engineering team.
- $100M+ in assets supported across Safe multisigs; $300K in donations managed.
Legal
- The Starknet Foundation’s first AML/KYB framework, on Sumsub. Legal set the bar.
- Compliance, legal and finance aligned across the US, UK and EU.
People
- The hiring pipeline across 25+ countries, and the screening assessment.
- Onboarding and offboarding SOPs rebuilt at Parity.
Security
- DevOps and security operations with Parity’s security team, Bug Bounty included; covered the function at Starknet.
- Self-monitoring at Chainlabs, so an outage pages someone.
Engineering
- Production code through reviewed pull requests.
- The helper chat bot the network runs on.
Ecosystem
- Polkadot Developer Heroes: 100+ developers onboarded.
- Seed, Growth and Propulsion grants at Starknet, still open.
Off the clock
North London born, with spells living in the north of England, Berlin and Lisbon, and family roots in East Africa. Big on sport: football and F1 above all, and I play padel, run and train. The rest of my time goes on family, friends and the dog. Deep geek for music and film.
How this site was made
The same loop, run on this site.
A written brief and a single source of truth for every claim, then the checks I run on any build: a fact audit against my own records, copy review, accessibility and performance checks, and screenshots on three screen sizes before it ships.
Every input to this site, wired to what it fed. Hover a node.
Contact
Tell me about the process.
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