Talking to the World Around Us: My AICON Belfast 2026 Talk
At AICON Belfast 2026 I asked what happens when we can talk to the world around us. Five lessons from running an AI guide live in three national museums.
Experience
First-hand accounts from building and scaling engineering teams and products, including the parts that did not go to plan.
2026
SF Tech Week 2026: Are San Francisco Founders Superhuman?
I spent three weeks in San Francisco for SF Tech Week and TechCrunch Disrupt to find out if founders there are different. The answer was encouraging.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Lessons from Startup Battlefield
Intero Biosystems won Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, with Apate as runner-up. What their pitches taught me, plus my first Hollywood moment.
Silicon Valley Diary: Meta, Stanford, the HP Garage and Waymo
A visit to Meta, a Stanford tour with an old co-founder, the HP garage, a Waymo ride that broke my trust and my first poker game, at MongoDB's Poker Night.
From Boarding Room to Boardroom: EchonLabs' First Board Meeting
I flew from the UK to Sri Lanka for the first board meeting of EchonLabs, the startup I founded as an undergraduate, and my first ever as a director.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2025
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.
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%.
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.
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.