Technology was a hobby long before it was a job.

My first computer was an Amstrad CPC-464, and I was a bit obsessed with it. I played the cassette games, sat through the loading (and quite often found it hadn't worked), and was really pleased when I got a memory pack that plugged into the back.

I wrote my first program on it too: a little text adventure in BASIC that I was proud enough to show my dad. He had to sit and read the story, and it would ask him “Which way do you want to go?”. He pressed a letter, E for east or W for west, and the next part of the story printed out. It was mostly IF statements, but it worked.

At school we had RM Nimbus machines, which felt like the next level up. They had a paint program and, if I remember rightly, a game called Worm that every kid was hooked on.

Then PCs arrived, the 486s and then the 586s, and I started taking them apart. I learned how to upgrade the components myself, and eventually went out and bought my own graphics card. I installed Windows 3.1 from a pile of floppy disks, then 95, 98 and ME, and I've been playing with them ever since.

I've never been happy just using technology. I want to know how far it can go, and the best way I know to find out is to build something with it.

Building websites with AI, and finding out what's really possible now rather than what people say is possible. I'd do it whether anyone paid me or not, and it's the main reason the last few years produced eight live products rather than one.

Really, I just like making things, and there have never been better tools for it.