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My work · The honest versionA walk through twenty years of building things, from business dashboards to streetlamps that keep talking through a flood. The thread that runs through all of it: systems that keep working when conditions don't cooperate. Which is roughly the job description for technology in the North Pennines.
My bread and butter is dashboards and CRMs, and CRM undersells it: these are all-in-one systems, with customers, projects, jobs, quotes and invoicing under one roof. Not the hollow kind you buy off the shelf and abandon by March, either. The ones I build are stitched into everything a business runs on: bookings, invoicing, email, spreadsheets, bank feeds, industry systems. Tons of integrations, so data stops living in twelve places and starts living in one. And because half the brief these days is "let me manage everything from my phone", several of these have shipped with their own iOS and Android apps, so the whole business rides in your pocket.
Then AI goes in deep, not sprinkled on top. The system reads the documents, spots the patterns, drafts the follow-ups and surfaces the things a busy owner would otherwise notice three weeks too late. The point is never the technology; it's that someone's Sunday-night admin disappears, and the numbers that matter are just there, telling you where the business should go next.
That's what I've done for licensing exchanges, insurance automation platforms, solicitors, estate agents and healthcare practices. One build moved £15 million of deals in its first three months after we replaced forms-and-email with something people actually wanted to use. The scale runs from five-person practices to payment networks and an international stock exchange group; the shape of the problem almost never changes.
Software is half of me. The other half is ten years of IoT: technology I've built that powers streetlights, monitors for power companies, tracks vehicle fleets, and sits underneath critical infrastructure as its security and backup communications. It runs everywhere from a national communications provider to critical infrastructure. The fullest example is iLamp: smart streetlamps deployed around the world, thousands of them, each one completely standalone, no mains, no cabling, nothing but the pole it stands on. Every lamp has to find its neighbours, form a network out of thin air, and stay in touch with base. That's some of the most stubborn networking there is, and I built the whole stack that manages those fleets to a target of 100% uptime.
The part I'm proudest of is what happens when everything else fails. In a flood, when the grid is down and every other communication channel has drowned with it, the lamps are routinely the only infrastructure left standing: still lit, still networked, still reporting. We built for natural disasters on purpose; the weather kept testing the claim.
Each lamp also carries two or more cameras, which at fleet scale becomes one of the biggest fully wireless camera networks anywhere. On top of that I built complete monitoring and security suites, meaning number-plate recognition, face and object detection and event alerts, with the AI running at the edge, on the lamp, because you can't stream thousands of video feeds over a network that's allergic to bandwidth.
And these fleets don't live in data centres. They live outdoors, globally, in every climate that wants to kill electronics:
After a decade of that, a winter on the tops above Rookhope holds no surprises.
That decade is also a security pedigree: fleets locked down with per-device cryptographic keys, cameras doing their detecting on the device, and systems trusted as the layer that keeps critical infrastructure safe and talking. The same discipline now sits behind my business IT service, pointed at a five-person firm instead of a national fleet.
Underneath all of that sits the layer most people never think about: how devices actually talk. I've designed communication protocols from scratch and built the servers behind them, handling tens of thousands of devices at once. GSM and the 3GPP standards run deep, LTE-M especially, alongside LoRa, Sigfox and satellite including Starlink. At the physical end: long-distance Wi-Fi, point-to-point wireless, and fibre installs to connect whole sites.
The best of it is pager, my reliability layer for IoT. Devices sleep for years on a AAA battery yet answer in around 20 seconds, because the server holds, pushes, retries and escalates every message, so nothing is ever silently lost. It runs today under a nationwide refrigerated fleet, a power company, street cabinets and thousands of sensors. Engineering for scarcity, of power, signal and budget, is exactly the habit rural work needs.
Nothing above was built for the North Pennines. All of it might as well have been.
Estate agents, land agents, solicitors, accountants. The dashboards and CRMs I've built for legal, property and healthcare practices are exactly the shape your practice needs: client records, deadlines, follow-ups and documents in one place, with AI doing the reading you don't have time for.
Shops, hospitality and growing firms that just need their IT to work. The same security, backup and monitoring discipline I've applied to critical infrastructure, scaled to a business plan: email, files, tills and support handled by one person who answers.
And if your business does happen on the hill: the sensors, cameras and connectivity in parts two and three were proven on standalone poles through floods and Alaskan winters. A Pennine fell won't beat them.
The walk-through above blends twenty years of projects. Some of the names and worlds they came from:
Ray-Ban, Mastercard, Vodafone, the world's largest licensing exchange, an international stock exchange group. And closer to the everyday: solicitors, estate and land agents, healthcare practices, farms and estates, and more UK service businesses than any tidy list can hold. If you run one, chances are I've already built for someone like you.
Free, no-obligation site visit anywhere in Weardale or Alston Moor. I'll tell you honestly if you don't need me.