Defining who you are in HTML feels like a futile exercise. I'm most comfortable sharing stories around a campfire or cooking a meal together, and I've always preferred to understand the world through the people I meet rather than the things I read.
But here we are. So instead of a bio, this is closer to the conversation I'd have if you asked me what I care about, and why.
Family
I married my wife Emma-Jane 15 years ago. Our son is 4 and our daughter is 3. Everything else on this page comes second to them. Every good decision I've ever made has been for them.
Fatherhood teaches you perspectives you didn't know existed and reveals things about yourself you might never have found otherwise. It's relentless in its demands, but unbounding in the joy, pride, and meaning it brings.
How I Think About Technology
I've lived through some weird tech shifts. My first camera used film. My first music was on tape. The closest thing to on-demand TV was a VHS of "Curly Sue" we watched so often the tape stretched to half speed. If you wanted to call a friend (or a girl!) you had to call a landline and get through their mom first. No SMS. No Mxit. No BBM. No Whatsapp. When I learnt to drive, I navigated the ungodly amount of kilometres I looped around Johannesburg using an old school map book, narrowly avoiding more than a few accidents as I furiously flipped through pages to figure out where the map continued.
I did my primary school homework projects from a set of 20-year-old encyclopedias, but spent my last year at university with a well beaten plastic black first-generation Intel MacBook. The groundbreaking "smart watch" my grandfather proudly wore when I was a kid was a Casio with a full (tiny!) calculator which I set up for him using a toothpick, and now I track my sleep, pay for shopping and monitor my heart rate through the one I wear on my own wrist.
I've lived through data going from floppies to stiffies to CDs to USB sticks. Internet going from non-existent, through dial-up to ISDN to ADSL to fibre. The democratisation of the internet, even if it took Africa a bit longer to almost catch up. Gaming went from Tamagotchis to the launch of the first PlayStation and beyond. The birth of mobile networks. The launch of the iPhone and an App Store that completely rewrote the software distribution model. I've watched tech giants get built and watched some of them fall.
I've lived through the real transition from analogue to digital, with a personal understanding of what both meant. And now this! The era of AI, where all of the combined chaos of tech change over the last 40 years feels small compared to what we're living through right now, and infinitesimal compared to the amount of change ahead!
I've always believed technology is an enabler. I still choose to believe that in the discussion of AI. I have deep concern for the personal, social, and ethical issues that we cannot escape, while leaning in to embrace the genie that cannot be put back into the bottle.
If all your energy is spent on "monitoring the situation" without getting your hands dirty deeply understanding it, you're going to be misinformed and left behind. 10x delivery is not a blog post title, it's a reality. Small, focused, competent and token-hungry teams will outperform and kill bloated large organisations. Those who do not "figure this out" will not survive.
Any person, in any industry, can revolutionise their daily life by shifting from thinking about AI as a helpful chat assistant to realising personal, human-led, agentic workflow thinking. The models and tooling are not the bottleneck. The humans are.
Software engineering is 6 to 12 months ahead of almost every other industry when it comes to AI uplift. Other industries may have felt displacement sooner, but none can claim the same level of focus on making people better at what they do. This isn't accidental. The big AI labs are open about the fact that software is the first frontier. It helps that our cohort are tech-savvy, but the primary reason for impact delivery in our industry ahead of everyone else's is actually just completely selfish corporate thinking: better software engineering and better software workflows directly benefit the development of the next generation of models.
Because of this, we (the Software Engineers) are getting a glimpse of the future now.
Code AGI will be achieved in 20% of the time of full AGI, and capture 80% of the value of AGI.
swyx.io
In my experience, this is accurate. And I'm on a mission to make sure we don't leave anyone behind as we figure out what this means for our industry, and how it translates into every other industry.
Travel & Adventure
I'm grateful for the many wonderful countries I've been able to see, and especially for the less traditional destinations that work has opened up. Some of the most memorable places I've visited are ones I never would have found on my own.
I travel by adventure motorcycle whenever I can. Sometimes the best gift you can give yourself is a trip down a dirt road where the cell phone reception fades and the sunset gets wider and more vibrant. I have never regretted seeking out natural beauty and hard-to-reach places. Any time, money or energy spent is rewarded tenfold in inspiration, rest and memories with those you love.
Photography
I've literally taken millions of photos. I know because I had to keep replacing the shutter mechanism every 200,000 to 300,000 actuations. But these days I've come to believe that the best camera to own is the one you carry with you.
Photos are primarily about documenting memories. If you can capture the feeling and emotion well enough to replay on a future date, the tech doesn't matter. These days we're reaching more and more for our old film cameras as we embrace the unique beauty and warmth that only the film process can bring.
Emma still shoots beautiful and thoughtful work for brands through Good Content and for people through Lad & Lass, the latter of which I help out with when she needs an extra hand on the weekends.
Making Things
Cooking, carpentry, and crafting. These are some of the ways I lean into the analog world
of making. Instead of speaking things into existence with an LLM, or digitally wielding it
into existence through a dev stack, you have to put real sweat in. You burn your hands, splinter your fingers and stub your toes. You have no
git reset --hard when you screw up a joint, or linting rule that will
remember to put salt in the rice.
The beauty and joy of being able to touch and feel the toils of your labour balances the lack thereof in my digital world. Food tastes better when cooked with someone specific in mind. Meals are more homey around a table you built in your garage. Fixing something that is broken, or restoring a timeless tool to its former glory brings small joys that compound.
Before kids, this was my primary escape from the keyboard. These days I have less time for it, but I still lean in whenever the opportunity arises. The satisfaction of building something physical never fades.
If any of this resonated, I'd love to hear it in person. I'm easy to find and always up for a conversation over coffee, a braai, or a long ride somewhere with bad signal.