About

I joined mySymptoms as a co-founder in 2018 and have been building it ever since. It is a food and symptom diary for people with IBS, food intolerances and other chronic gut conditions. Working out which food is responsible is genuinely hard: the effects are delayed and there are too many variables to hold in your head. mySymptoms records what you eat and how you feel, and helps you find the pattern.

Eight years in, it is where most of my time goes.

Before

I have been writing software for thirty-five years, in more industries than I expected to.

Satellite image processing. Oil and gas project management. Equity and bond syndication, as Head of Software Development for Capital Markets Europe at Ipreo. Compliance management. Broadcast television, running IT for a company doing post production and outside broadcasts. Clinical and regulatory services for medical devices, at a company I was a founder member of in 2001.

I cut my teeth on C and Unix, worked through C++ and Java, and spent several years in Scala and Lift, where I contributed a couple of things back to the open source community. I have shipped desktop software, native Android apps and web applications.

Before mySymptoms I built SeeSpeak, a video phone for elderly people who found ordinary tablets impenetrable. A seven-inch Android tablet that ran one piece of software and nothing else.

I studied cognitive science at Manchester and have an MBA from Imperial. In between two jobs I spent eight months at a yoga ashram, teaching classes and helping run the place.

The rest of the time

I build small things, usually to find something out.

Some are about how software gets made now. Snapity turns a photo of a poster, or a screenshot of a message, into a calendar entry. I built it to see how far AI agents could be pushed: the code, the marketing site, and the platform setup for Android, iPhone, Windows, Mac and Linux.

YT Music Album Sorter came later and narrowed the question. It is a Chrome extension that sorts my own music library, and the rule that time was that I never read the code. Another experiment asked whether I could build and ship an entire site from a phone.

Others test an idea. One is a citizen science project measuring how people move through public space without identifying anyone. Another is an ear trainer built as a playground rather than a set of exercises, on the theory that musicians improve faster given tools to explore than given tests to pass.

I write up the ones that teach me something.

Cambridge, UK. I am on LinkedIn.