About

The paying part

I run The Creative Tinker, a web design and development studio for small businesses. I started it at 19, on the reasonable assumption that someone would stop me. Nobody did, so here we are, seven years later.

Most of the work is WordPress. Some of it is built from scratch in Laravel when a business needs something no plugin will give it. The rest is care plans, which is a polite way of saying I keep other people's websites alive. I don't do SEO. There are people who enjoy it. I'm not one of them.

The plugin part

I co-own SQ1 Digital with Dan Barrett. We make WP Extended, a WordPress plugin that strips out the clutter and adds the bits WordPress forgot. We met at WordCamp Europe, had a similar vision, and started a company. It has gone better than that sentence suggests.

Things I have started

I have a lots of projects in various states of nearly. There's Tinkr, a home for small self-hosted APIs I got tired of paying for. There's HQ, an app to run my entire life, which is going about as well as that ambition deserves. There's this site, which I rebuild every time I learn something new.

A project stops being interesting the moment I work out how to build it. I know this about myself. I'm told awareness is the first step.

Why there is so much data here

The homepage is a timeline of things I've logged: what I read, where I went, what I ate, how I slept, which flights I've taken There's overThirteen types and counting. You can see what I'm up to now, read what happened on this day in previous years, or subscribe to any of it.

The reason is boring and sincere. I'd rather my own data lived somewhere I control than in a company that will shut down in three years and take it with them. So it lives here, in files I own, on a domain I pay for.

I once analysed six years of food logs to work out my eating habits. This has changed nothing about my behaviour.

When I'm not at a computer

I play tennis, squash and padel with more enthusiasm than skill. I co-host a weekly business podcast with my dad, where we talk about what we learned that week. I go to the cinema often enough that I track it.

Say hello

I like email. I like it more than most forms of contact invented since. You can find me here, or follow along through the feeds if you'd rather read than write.