about
Board room. Server room. Workbench.
I have spent twenty years leading technology in UK businesses, and I still do some of the engineering myself.
By day I am SVP Technology at a UK-headquartered PLC that designs and manufactures embedded PC and display systems, with teams in the UK, US, Taiwan and Italy. The job covers the full estate: cloud and infrastructure, business systems, security and compliance, and the organisation that runs them.
I also founded Shwok Technology Consulting, a small practice that gives SMEs senior technology leadership without a full-time hire. Clients deal with me directly, not with an account manager.
Outside work I build and repair things: home automation, local AI on small hardware, and component-level repair of kit most people would throw away. I write that up on my blog.
How I work
Habits
They apply to a board paper and to a breadboard alike.
Durable over clever
Pick what the next person can maintain. A neat hack that only its author understands is a liability.
Cost and risk together
Every option comes with what it costs, what can fail, and who owns the consequences.
Governance people follow
Data ownership, retention and access control kept practical, so the rules are followed rather than worked around.
Reasons, not slogans
Explain why something works, so the decision still holds once I have left the room.