Beyond
Technology was the hobby long before it was the job.
Twenty-eight years of doing this for a living started as a kid wanting to know how the box worked. That part never really changed.
It started with an Amstrad
My first computer was an Amstrad CPC-464, in the 1980s. Cassette tapes, a green screen, and the particular patience required to wait several minutes for a program to load and then find out it had not.
Everything since has been the same impulse. I have never especially wanted to simply use the technology — I want to know how far it goes, and the only way to find that out is to build something with it and see where it gives way.
The cave
I work from home in Hampshire, in an office I am unreasonably fond of: a laptop driving three monitors, and lights everywhere. My other half calls it the cave, which is fair, and I spend most of my time in it.
A fair amount of that time is not building anything. It is reading — following what is happening in web development, keeping up a set of email feeds that surface the things worth knowing about, and working out which of this month's inevitabilities is actually going to matter. Twenty-eight years in, the half-life of a certainty in this industry is about eighteen months, and the only defence is to keep reading.
What I actually enjoy
Building websites with AI, and finding out what is genuinely possible now rather than what people claim is possible. That is the thing I would do whether or not anyone paid me for it, and it is most of why the last few years have produced four live products instead of one.
Creative technologist is probably the honest label. Not an engineer who has been handed a specification, and not a designer who hands one over — the person who has an idea in the morning, decides how it should work, and has it running by the evening. Which is a grand way of saying I like making things, and this is the best set of tools anyone has ever had for it.
Beyond that: the weekly shop is, I am told, also part of my life.