ORIGINS

My career in technology began during the early Web 2.0 era — WAMP/LAMP stacks, Joomla CMS, osCommerce, AJAX, CSS. Very little worked out of the box. There was no ‘as-a-service’ safety net. Everything had to be configured, stabilised, or rebuilt entirely.

I didn’t learn technology through layers of abstraction. I learned it by working directly with the fundamentals — often forcing systems to behave under real-world constraints. That grounding taught me to reason from first principles, rather than conceptual frameworks.

Today, whether I’m working on business systems, custom applications, integration and orchestration stacks, data and analytics, machine learning, or generative AI, the philosophy remains the same:

Form follows function — how the system is meant to behave, not how it looks on paper

Viability over elegance — design for execution, not technical superiority

Architecture is persistent — operate with fundamentals, not moving concepts

It’s an Operator-Architect mindset: grounded, practical, and shaped by direct contact with the material of technology.

The blacksmith bears an unusual resemblance to the Operator-Architect. A resemblance that resonates strongly with me.

First, a blacksmith understands the material: its limits, its behaviour under heat, and its breaking points. They work directly with what they are shaping while remaining fully accountable for the outcome. Nothing is theoretical. That is the essence of operator-level architecture. Understanding how systems actually behave, not how diagrams suggest they should.

Second, a blacksmith never assumes a tool will do the job. If it doesn’t, they adjust it, heat it, hammer it, and forge it until it behaves. As AI and modern technologies accelerate, regulated organisations will face a familiar but amplified reality: tools won’t always behave as advertised. We must understand — and retain the ability to control — the operating environment in which those tools exist. We can't assume the tool will behave on it's own. 

This is the mindset behind OutSane.

Not to make technology look elegant, but to make it work in practice.