about
I sit between tech and business for a living, and I build small tools at night. It all started with a Blogspot sidebar.
Like a lot of kids then, I had a blog. The writing wasn’t the fun part. The fun part was opening the HTML, pasting in someone’s CSS, adding a marquee, breaking the layout, and fixing it again until my sidebar looked exactly how I wanted.
That was the first time I made something on a screen do what I told it to.
I decided I must like coding, so I took computer science at university, on a scholarship. Turns out university coding is a lot less “make the sidebar pink” and a lot more algorithms, but I stuck with it and leaned into data science.
My first job was a data science internship at a digital advertising company. I was excited. Then, within weeks, I was given manual data entry: copying information off websites, one row at a time.
I got bored, and honestly a bit lazy, so I taught myself to automate it. Selenium to click through the pages, BeautifulSoup to pull the data out. This was before “AI” was in everyone’s vocabulary.
The scripts cut about 80% of the manual work. My bosses were very happy, and they offered me a full-time role before my internship even ended.
Full-time, I moved into product analytics: roadmaps, user stories and testing for self-serve analytics products. I helped launch one of them with a 400-person hackathon, worked on a machine-learning model that predicts life stage from app and location signals, and defined a data backbone for 2M+ places and 400k+ apps across nine markets.
I also won the company’s award for outstanding performance, which I’m still a little proud of.
Then I joined one of the biggest game companies in the world, for a very serious reason: I played Honor of Kings (王者荣耀) and PUBG. A lot.
As a data engineer, I handled the pipelines behind games I actually played: streaming jobs, schedulers, dashboards for the game teams. It was real engineering, and it taught me something useful: that much “technical” wasn’t for me. I liked the problem more than the plumbing.
So I moved to the middle, as a technical business analyst at a global agency network. Half my day was with brands, half with engineers and vendors, and my job was to make them understand each other.
Most of what I did was digitalise very traditional work. A loyalty programme for 20,000+ small shops across Central and West Africa that used to be tracked with pen and paper, market by market. WhatsApp journeys for brands that knew they wanted one but not how. A data foundation for a global consumer brand across 11 markets.
Requirements, BRDs, UAT, go-live. Somewhere in there, I stopped coding. For a very long time.
With a videographer, who runs his own business. It needed a proper website, not just a Linktree, and I wanted to build it myself. But I’d forgotten most of what I knew.
I started on Carrd. Then AI coding tools arrived, and everything sped up. Things that would have taken me weeks of re-learning took an evening. That became his studio’s website, and I was hooked again.
I haven’t stopped since. Tournament platforms with live scoring for squash, padel and tennis, AI agents that find clients and run ad accounts, websites for cafés, brands and sports associations, an ops app that runs his whole business, and an app for our girls’ trip to Bali.
This site is where I write down how I build them, so you can build yours too.
get one built
Tell me the part of your week you keep doing by hand. If it repeats, there’s usually a small tool that can do it for you, and I’ll tell you honestly if it’s worth building.
