CTO, Software Engineer and Advisor.

In a career that started with the ZX Spectrum , and selling games I wrote in BASIC as a young kid, shifted to music and touring all over the world as a sound engineer, and then back to software engineering for the last 25 years, the one common thread has been working with others to accomplish a goal that is real and impactful.

Be it mixing live sound around the world with The Specials for many years, playing in my own band at Glastonbury Festival , working with iconic artists like Bob Dylan, James Brown, BB King, Ray Charles and countless others as house sound engineer in Los Angeles, or building software products and teams in the internet age, I've always been a people-person, and get the most satisfaction from connection and collaboration with others.

For the previous 14 years at Cookpad , the world's largest recipe social network, I led the technical expansion of Cookpad's Japanese-only service internationally as Global CTO. Having initially moved to Japan to work on the Cookpad domestic service and several new product ideas with the CEO and founder, I selected Bristol in the UK as the base for the new Global HQ where we grew to 100 staff, and grew the Cookpad service from 0 to 50+ million monthly users in 30 languages outside of Japan.

With Cookpad's support I led a huge amount of investment in community via conference sponsorships all over the world (40+ at last count) as well as being a Founding Board Member of the Rails Foundation where along with DHH and 8 other board members, the shared mission is to improve the documentation, events, and education around the framwork for the next 20 years and beyond!

Now, leveraging the countless lessons learned over the years, working with teams, building connected products and services, I spend my time working with tech startups and teams from MVP to PMF to scale up to IPO. Having worked as an individual contributor, writing the first lines of code then growing to 50m+ users, or hiring engineers and building the culture, or sitting on the board, I'm excited to be able to bring this wealth of experience and advice to others.

Along these lines, in late 2023 I joined Mindful Chef , the #1 recipe box in the UK, as CTO since it was too much of a great fit to pass up. There we run a Rails monolith, and are in the process of circling back to full-stack Rails with Hotwire, Turbo and Stimulus. Everything I love - Rails, tech leadership, working with great developers and of course great recipes and food!