I’m Tim.
Twenty years in, the technology is rarely the hard part.
I’ve been writing software since 2005 — first as an engineer, then leading engineering and data teams, and now as the person founders call when the ambition has outgrown the plan.
Most of my work sits where AI meets a real business, which is a more careful place than the noise suggests. The interesting question is almost never “can we”. It is whether the thing is worth the maintenance it will demand for the next five years, and whether the people who have to live with it will want to.
I like problems while they are still shapeless. Give me a messy Tuesday-morning workflow, a half-formed ambition and half an hour with the people who actually do the work, and I will come back with something specific: what to build, what to leave alone, and what it honestly costs.
The rest is temperament. I would rather show you a rough thing working on Friday than a beautiful deck in a fortnight, and I would rather lose the argument early than be proved right expensively.
- Since 2005
- writing software professionally, and still writing it
- Teams
- engineering and data groups built, led, hired and mentored
- One person
- you work with me directly — no bench, no handover
- Remote, mostly
- and in the room when the room is what it needs
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01
Start with the business, not the stack.
The technology is a consequence of a decision, not the decision itself. If we cannot say plainly what changes for the business when this works, it is not ready to be built — and no amount of architecture will rescue it later.
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02
The simplest thing that survives contact with reality.
Clever systems nobody can maintain are liabilities with good marketing. I would rather hand over something slightly boring that still works on the Monday after I leave, and that a new hire can read in an afternoon.
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03
Build it so you can own it.
Every engagement should end with your team more capable than it started. I write things down, I show the trade-offs I rejected as well as the one I took, and I plan from day one for the day you no longer need me.
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04
Say the uncomfortable thing early.
Most expensive failures were visible in the first fortnight and nobody wanted to name them. You are paying for judgement, and judgement that only ever agrees with you is worth nothing at all.
The hard part was never building it. It is deciding what deserves to exist.
