Topic

Experience

First-hand accounts from building and scaling engineering teams and products, including the parts that did not go to plan.

8 articles

How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas: YC's 10-Question Test

Nobody can predict which startup succeeds. Jared Friedman's YC framework: ten questions, four mistakes, and a free scorecard to grade your own idea.

1 Sept 2026

13 minRead

Building a Production-Ready MCP Server: How I Gave an AI Agent the Run of Our Platform, and Why I Removed Every Delete Button First

A Model Context Protocol server that exposes an entire production SaaS platform to an AI agent — content, sessions, devices, analytics, billing, jobs. Seven layers, 289 tools, and no delete button anywhere on the surface.

24 Aug 2026

20 minRead

Software Engineering's Great Re-bundling

AI made producing software artefacts cheap and verifying them expensive. That single split is why engineering roles are collapsing into fewer, wider ones.

9 Aug 2026

18 minRead

From Model to Product: Foundations for Practical AI Engineering

Everyone is building with AI today. Very few are building systems that actually work in production. This article explores the real gap between models and products, and why thinking like an AI engineer matters more than ever.

1 Apr 2026

5 minRead

Building a Production-Ready Prompt Engine: How I Designed a System That Handles Everything from Dynamic Templates to Multi-Layer Guardrails

A behind-the-scenes look at how I designed and built a production-ready prompt engine - from dynamic templates and reusable components to multi-layer guardrails, structured output, and parallel execution.

2 Dec 2025

8 minRead

Bringing Computer Vision to the Edge: How I Cut Real-Time Similarity Search Battery Usage by 50%

Building real-time computer vision on low-end mobile devices comes with unique challenges - especially when every second of inference drains battery. Here's how I optimised similarity search using HNSW and hybrid re-ranking to cut battery usage by over 50%.

29 Nov 2025

7 minRead

NI Tech Awards 2025: Belfast’s Tech Ecosystem Has Its Moment

Northern Ireland's inaugural tech awards brought the community together to celebrate innovation across 11 categories. Here's what it felt like to be in the room.

3 Oct 2025

4 minRead

Why I Chose Preact (And Why I Might Never Look Back)

When performance is non-negotiable and the app must shine on low-end devices, you start questioning your default stack. Here’s why I chose Preact - the tiny, powerful alternative to React - and how it reshaped my dev experience on the edge.

5 Jun 2025

3 minRead