Blog
The MRA Score: The Measure of a Genuinely New Idea
I built the MRA Score to rank how absurd each Modern Retro reimagining was. It turned into something more interesting: a tool for measuring novelty itself.
ReadGitHub Actions + Claude API: My Automated Weekly Build Log
How I stopped losing track of what I build every week. A GitHub Actions workflow, a launchd daemon, the Claude API, and 15 weeks of commit history that previously lived only in my head.
ReadFantasy Football Live Draft Tracker: What I Broke on GW38
A live fantasy football pick tracker for GW38: how I shipped it in a single session, broke it on air at half-time, and learned not to touch working code during a live match.
ReadWhat 50 Editions of EVERYWEAR Taught Me About Taste Machines
Fifty consecutive days of fashion intelligence. What the system does, what the constraint forces, and what the data says about where fashion coverage is actually going.
ReadThe Bottleneck Moved: Five New Constraints After Code with Claude 2026
An editorial reading of Code with Claude 2026, London. The model is no longer the constraint. Five new bottlenecks replace coding, and the one that matters most is decisions.
ReadModern Retro: 100 Brand Films for $196
The production story behind 100 custom Luma AI films for Modern Retro. 199 tracked generations, four rounds of fixes, $196.10 total. Under $2 per film.
ReadWhat 33,643 Links Reveal About How You Think
I extracted every URL from a decade of personal Slack archives. 33,643 links. 474 channels. Here is what the data shows.
ReadTaste, Machines, and a Newsletter I Refused to Stop Writing
When Twitter killed Revue, I lost a newsletter I loved. Rebuilding it taught me the real bottleneck in AI work is knowing what you want clearly enough to ask.
ReadAudio is the Layer: 10 Beliefs on Voice AI and the Next Decade
Audio is not a feature. It is the foundational layer of the next decade. Ten beliefs about where the market goes, from someone who has built four voice agents inside it.
ReadThe Optimist's Operating System: 10 Beliefs for Britain's Builders
Ten beliefs about building in uncertain times. A framework, a diagnostic, a deck and a phone number. Britain's builders are already running this.
ReadAnthropic Named the Most Undervalued Hire in AI. It's Profile 1.
Fiona Fung, Anthropic's engineering leader for Claude Code, named two hiring profiles. Profile 1 is creative builders with product sense. Most companies miss it entirely.
ReadBritain's Case for Better: 3 Reasons Progress Is Still Possible
Cynicism is easy. Progress isn't guaranteed. But the evidence for Britain's capacity to transform is already there.
ReadConfidence Compounds: The Mechanics of Building in Public
Confidence isn't a feeling you wait for. It's a mechanism that builds incrementally, one visible act at a time.
ReadCreativity Builds Culture: Why Every Tech Company Needs a Culture-Maker
Culture isn't what you say about your company. It's the sum of what you make and share. Creative output is infrastructure, not decoration.
ReadFuture Literacy: Why Every Leader Needs to Speak AI
Future literacy is no longer optional. The founders and leaders who will shape the next decade are learning to speak AI, biotech, and networked systems now.
ReadOptimist's Operating System: 12 Months Later
I wrote that Britain's problem isn't capability, it's belief. Twelve months of building later, here's what held up, what surprised me, and what I'd add.
ReadOptimism Is a Skill: How to Build It in 3 Steps
Optimism isn't a personality type or a default setting. It's a practice with a method. The 3-part approach behind belief 01 of The Optimist's Operating System.
ReadOptimism Is Tribal: 3 Reasons Britain's Builders Are Finding Each Other
Optimistic people cluster. They build things, start movements and shape culture. A new generation of British builders is already finding each other.
ReadOptimism = Realism + Imagination: The 3-Part Formula That Works
Real optimism sees the challenges clearly but chooses to act anyway. This is the formula: realism + imagination + decision.
ReadProgress Is Iterative: Why Version 1 Is Always Enough
The future is forged one experiment at a time. Version 1 is not a compromise. It's the only available method.
ReadSignal Over Noise: 3 Habits of Long-View Builders
Wisdom whispers. Hype shouts. The builders who win long-term have learned to find the signal and ignore the noise.
ReadThe Future Is Still to Be Written: Your Chapter Starts on Day 1
No one knows how this ends. The uncertainty isn't a reason to wait. It's the reason to start. The future is open.
ReadThe High Agency Multiplier: Why AI Favours People Who Decide
John Collison would bet on high-agency people for the next decade. AI did not create them. It multiplied them. Klarna, Levels, MIT's 95% pilots, and what the loop actually looks like.
ReadOutput Stacking: How 3 AI Sessions Replaced Multitasking
Output stacking is the new shape of knowledge work. Three parallel AI sessions, one orchestrator, no multitasking. Why I stopped working sequentially without ever deciding to.
ReadWing's Enterprise Tech 30: Why Voice AI and Vertical Apps Won 2026
98 VCs from 85 firms agreed on a list of 60 enterprise tech companies. I had skin in two of three bets it blessed before institutional consensus arrived. What 18 months in voice and verticals taught me about being right early.
ReadEdited by Humans
At Google, 75% of new code is AI-written. At Anthropic and OpenAI, 100%. The job flipped from writer to editor, and the people with taste just got promoted.
ReadHow My Sites Started Healing Themselves
Two days. That is how long it took me to notice 394 venues had vanished from one of my sites. The story of building a self-healing data layer across six solo projects, and the one rule worth starting with.
ReadThe Dataset That Didn't Exist – London's Pram Map
1,140 London venues verified by phone call. The dataset that didn't exist, built for a 2-year-old, and what 10,000+ calls to London cafes and restaurants actually found.
ReadMoving Fast Breaks Things Slowly
One missing field triggered a morning audit. The audit found 64 silent issues across a library I thought was error free. Here is what that taught me about building fast with AI.
ReadMy Channels Are My Attention Map
I built a weekly digest that reads my Slack activity and tells me what mode I was in. It turns out the channels you save to say more about your attention better than your calendar does.
ReadThe Second Brain Has Overtaken The Second Screen
The second screen was a broadcast industry dream that dissolved into distraction. The second brain is what replaced it. Here is what changes when AI makes your notes think.
ReadWalk Right In
London has a deep anxiety about turning up to a restaurant without a booking. The Queue Index data says that anxiety is mostly unfounded.
ReadOne Template. Fifty Decks.
Fifty presentations. One shared template. A nine-step production pipeline. Here is what building the same thing fifty times teaches you about compound creative infrastructure.
ReadKeep Your Eyes on the Grid
A 24-year-old who worked inside OpenAI turned $225M into $5.5B by betting on electricity, not chips. Leopold Aschenbrenner's Megawatt Thesis and why it matters for everyone building with AI.
ReadThe Great Unplug
Nordic countries ran the biggest classroom technology experiment in history. The data came back negative. They reversed course. Here is what they found, and what it means for every organisation rolling out AI right now.
Read50 Days of The Pattern: From Technical Experiment to Editorial Conviction
At 30 editions, I knew The Pattern worked technically. At 50, I know it works editorially. Here is what changed, what the redesign taught me, and what 50 consecutive autonomous editions actually proves.
ReadEverything You Use Is Tokenised Now
The entire AI stack has converged on token-based pricing. This is not a coincidence. It is the business model. Here is what it means for everyone using AI tools.
ReadKing's Cross: Why Talent Clusters Beat Data Centres
OpenAI halted Stargate UK on Tuesday. Four days later it signed 88,500 sq ft in King's Cross. Two stories, one truth: the UK is winning the talent war.
ReadThe Velocity Gap
The companies winning with AI aren't the ones with the best tools. Everyone has Copilot. What actually separates them is permission, process redesign, and measuring the right things.
ReadPrototypes Are the New Pitches
Why building things beats pitching them -- and what the agency industry's biggest restructuring in decades tells us about what comes next.
ReadThe Harness Problem: What Ramp Got Right About AI-Native
Ramp hit 99% AI tool adoption and then noticed most people were stuck. What they built to fix it is a masterclass in AI-native thinking.
ReadAbundance Isn't Enough
I've shipped 20+ AI products in two years. Some felt hollow. Some didn't. For a long time I couldn't explain the difference. Then I read Sam Lessin's essay on AI and meaning.
ReadThe Meaning Recession
The real AI crisis is not about jobs. It is about why we get out of bed. On the collapse of the effort-to-value link, the new scarcity of trust, and why building is the only answer I have found.
ReadI Built a Personal Health OS With an AI
9 years of data sitting on my phone, never looked at. One afternoon with Claude later: biological age 35, RHR 48, and a dashboard that actually connects everything. Here is what I built and what it taught me.
ReadGym Is The New Night Out
480 UK nightclubs have closed since 2020. Barry's has a DJ booth. 45% of Gen Z have never had a drink. The night out didn't die. It just got up earlier.
ReadSaving without reviewing is hoarding
The act of saving something feels productive. But saving without reviewing is just hoarding with better UX. The review is the work. The save is the easy part.
Read10 Things I Learnt From 10 Years of Saves
A personal Slack workspace, 459 channels, a decade of data. What ten years of saves actually reveals about how you think, what you care about, and when you change.
ReadUsing Slack as a scrapbook
A 90-day analysis of my personal knowledge workspace. 459 channels, 3,312 messages, 1,859 URLs. What came back surprised me.
ReadThe Slack Dashboard Bible
Everything about the Slack dashboard project: how it was built, why, the data, the insights, the market, the vision, and what comes next.
ReadThe Kerosene Lamp Stage
gmoney's Jevons Paradox frame is the clearest explanation I've read of why the market keeps getting AI wrong.
ReadThe Speed of the Story
A $1.8B telehealth startup. Two employees. One viral tweet. An FDA warning already on file. What the Medvi story teaches us about narrative velocity.
ReadI Built an AI That Called 2,000 London Cafes to Find Out Which Ones My Buggy Can Get Into
Nobody has ever collected buggy accessibility data systematically. So I built a voice agent that asks one question: are you pram-friendly?
Read10 Things I Learned Calling 3,000 London Restaurants with AI
What happens when you point three AI voice agents at thousands of London restaurants and let them ring.
ReadWhat Happens When You Ask London's Restaurants Their One Essential Dish
I built an AI voice agent that calls restaurants and asks one question: what should a first-timer order? The dish name is the review.
ReadWhat Happens When You Call 50 London Restaurants With an AI Voice Agent
I built an AI that calls London's top 50 restaurants every Saturday and asks one question: how long's the wait? Week 1 broke everything. Here is what I learned.
ReadHow to Evaluate an Agency That Builds
When agencies pitch with prototypes instead of decks, the evaluation changes. A practical guide for CMOs and procurement directors.
Read30 Days of The Pattern: What an AI-Native Publication Taught Me About Culture
After 30 consecutive editions of The Pattern, an AI-native daily culture briefing, here is what I learned about infrastructure, scarcity, authenticity, and building systems that connect dots humans miss.
ReadThe Prototype Is the New Pitch
Agencies spend $12.5 billion a year on pitches with a 19% win rate. AI just collapsed the cost of building to near zero. The prototype replaces the performance.
ReadPermission Not Required
Job titles are fences. The brief is a permission slip. The most interesting agencies right now never built the walls. A strategist's case for working beyond your label.
ReadWhen AI Shops For You, Taste Becomes the Product
Agent Pay shipped. Santander completed Europe's first live AI agent transaction. The storefront is becoming irrelevant. Here's what that means for brands.
ReadThe Command Line Became the Creative Studio
AI turned the blinking cursor into the most powerful creative tool of 2026. The barrier was never skill. It was permission.
ReadHow Creativity Gets Its Value Back
Creative agencies lost 75% of their pricing power in 30 years. Media won because it learned to count. Here's how it comes back.
ReadThe New Knowledge Worker
The knowledge economy rewarded knowing things. AI just made knowing things free. What comes next is better.
ReadWhen Strategy Learned to Build
The strategist who can build has an unfair advantage. The prototype is the new deck. Strategy is a verb now.
ReadWhat Happens When You Turn a Bookshelf Into an Experience
200+ book covers you can drag, flip, shake, scatter, and curate into shareable cards. Plus a quiz, curated lists, and 3D book pages. All vanilla JS, zero frameworks.
ReadCulture Is Infrastructure
Nobody owns where the brand sits in culture. Not marketing, not comms, not the strategy team. I built the tools to prove that cultural intelligence can be operationalised, not as a department, but as a system.
ReadThe Best AI Products Don't Sound Like AI Products
Most AI products talk about themselves the same way: transformative, powerful, seamless. The brands that win will be the ones that sound like themselves, not like the category.
ReadBuilders Are the New Influencers
The most powerful position in 2026 isn't creator or builder. It's both. When you make things and share the process, content becomes distribution and the product becomes the proof.
ReadBuilding Without Code: A Strategy Director's Guide to Shipping Products with AI
What used to require a team of 5 and 6 months, one person built in weeks. Not because the tools got easier. Because the bottleneck was never the code.
ReadHow I Built a Daily Culture Briefing That Runs Itself
Every morning at 7am, an AI reads 50+ culture feeds, identifies five signals, writes a briefing, records it in a cloned voice, and publishes it as a podcast. I built it in a weekend.
ReadCase Study: First Out
Know where to stand on the tube platform for the fastest exit. 383 stations, 19 lines, 90+ features. The story of building First Out.
ReadCase Study: Taste OS
Taste is measurable. A scoring framework for brand taste: 5 dimensions, 100 points, 44 brands scored. The story of building Taste OS.
ReadCase Study: The Pattern
How one person built a fully automated daily culture intelligence briefing. 140+ RSS feeds, Claude AI synthesis, a cloned voice podcast, and zero human intervention.
ReadHow I Built the Only Tube App That Understands Buggies
Every tube app tells you IF a station is step-free. None tell you WHERE to stand. That's a different problem. Here's how a strategist built the solution.
ReadCase Study: Nihongo
How a non-coder built a 5,000-line Japanese learning app with handwriting recognition, spaced repetition, and interactive dialogues.
ReadAfter Knowing
What happens when the thing you were paid to know, everyone can know? On the repricing of the knowledge economy, the apprenticeship problem, and what comes next.
ReadMedia Tsundoku
The Japanese concept of buying books you never read, applied to the digital age of tabs, bookmarks, and infinite saves.
ReadThe New Flex
The old flex was what you bought. The new flex is what you built, curated, or quit. Status symbols have changed — most people haven't noticed.
ReadYou Are What You Save
Why what you save says more about you than what you create. Curation as identity in the algorithmic age.
ReadCase Study: CultureTerminal
Building a Techmeme for culture. How I scored 800+ articles weekly across fashion, design, tech, and brands using a 5-factor algorithm and 27 curated sources.
ReadCase Study: Modern Retro
How a stupid question about Supreme in 1974 became a 96-brand AI art gallery with a scoring system, print shop, and Wes Anderson aesthetic.
ReadCase Study: Trove
Building a taste engine that turns your saved links into a mirror. How I built a product by ruthlessly cutting features instead of adding them.
ReadThe 11:47pm Ship
The specific feeling of deploying something late at night when nobody's watching. The house is quiet. Just you and a terminal. The purest moment in building.
ReadWhat Innovation Needs From Advertising
Agency innovation labs produce nothing because they separate invention from the people who understand audiences. The best ideas come from the work itself.
ReadThe Aesop Effect
When every detail is so right that no single detail stands out. How Aesop became the benchmark for taste so embedded it's invisible.
ReadThe Algorithm Owes Me Nothing
The best products aren't built for algorithmic reach. They're built because the maker cared about the craft. Why detaching from distribution metrics leads to better work, stronger portfolios, and real creative freedom.
ReadThe Algorithm Doesn't Know What You'll Love Tomorrow
Recommendation engines are mirrors, not windows. They show you more of what you already like. But taste doesn't grow in an echo chamber.
ReadThree Hours Is All You Need
Most builders think they need more time. They don't. A tight window forces better decisions, faster shipping, and products that actually get finished.
ReadThe Bookshop I'll Never Open
The shop that lives in my head. A fantasy about the space I'd create if money and logistics didn't matter. About taste made physical.
ReadBuilding in Public Is Overrated
Most building in public is performance art. Real building is messy, private, and unglamorous. Ship the thing, then talk about it.
ReadBuilding in the Margins
The most interesting products aren't built in funded sprints with full teams. They're built in the gaps, between meetings, after hours, on the train. Margins are where the best ideas live.
ReadThe Case for Publishing With Intent
Everyone is creating, nobody is consuming. When every person is a content creator, who is the audience? The case for being a great consumer instead of a mediocre creator.
ReadThe Discovery Renaissance
You can't just walk into the internet anymore. Everything is a feed, a recommendation, a search result. The serendipity of stumbling onto something you didn't know you wanted. That's gone.
ReadThe Third Place Is Evolving
Coffee shops, pubs, bookstores: the places where community happened organically are disappearing. What we lost and where we go next.
ReadThe Demo Effect
A working product changes the room. One demo beats a hundred decks. When you stop presenting ideas and start showing them, everything shifts.
ReadDon't Design for Everyone
The most tasteful products are deliberately exclusionary. They make choices that some people won't like. That's the point. Design for everyone and you design for no one.
ReadEverything Is a Subscription Now
Cars, razors, software, fitness, even friendship. When everything becomes a recurring payment, ownership dies. And with it, something about identity.
ReadThe Feed Before the Feed
Before algorithmic feeds, you built your own internet. Blogrolls, RSS readers, curated Twitter follows, Delicious tags. The lost art of assembling your own information diet, and why choosing your sources was itself an act of taste.
ReadForty Things I Know
Not advice. Just 40 observations from 40 years. Short, honest, no framework. Building, taste, life, career, parenting, culture, football.
ReadThe Fourteen-Product Playbook
Patterns, mistakes, and what actually works after shipping 14 products in under a year. The non-obvious lessons nobody tells you.
ReadThe Generalist's Revenge
Specialists had their era. AI just handed the future to generalists who see connections across domains. Range is the new unfair advantage.
ReadThe Internet Worth Building Again
Peak Twitter, Tumblr, Delicious, StumbleUpon. Not rose-tinted glasses, specific memories of a 2010-2015 internet that was real-time, serendipitous, and human-curated. What was actually lost, and whether it can come back.
ReadThe Invisible Skills
The strategy skills nobody lists on a CV but that transfer perfectly to product building: audience instinct, taste, brief-writing, pattern recognition, and reading a room.
ReadThe Last Monoculture
Football is the only thing left where millions experience the same thing at the same time. No algorithm, no personalised feed. Just 3pm Saturday.
ReadThe Meeting That Should Have Been a Product
All those strategy meetings, all those brainstorms. What if you just built the thing? The transition from 'let's discuss' to 'let me show you.'
ReadThe Month I Started Making Things
One month ago I wasn't building anything. Now there are 14 live products. An honest account of what changed: the first deploy, the snowball, the failures.
ReadNobody Asked for Modern Retro
A stupid question about Supreme in 1974 became my proudest project. 96 brands, AI images, a scoring system, a print shop. No brief. No client. Just taste.
ReadShow the Work, Not the Promise
Companies hire proof. That's why I build. The portfolio isn't vanity - it's the only argument that works when you're changing lanes.
ReadNostalgia Is Getting Faster
Nostalgia cycles used to be 20 years. Now they're 5. We're experiencing collective deja vu at an accelerating rate. What happens when the present becomes the past almost immediately?
ReadThe Notification Economy
Every app wants your attention right now. But the most valuable thing in 2026 isn't content, it's silence. Notification fatigue is a design problem, not a user problem.
ReadWhen an Idea Won't Let Go
Some products get built because they're on a roadmap. The best ones get built because the idea won't leave you alone. The case for following creative obsession.
ReadThe Person Who Sends You Things
Everyone has one friend who sends links constantly. Articles, restaurants, albums, products. I am that person. The compulsion to connect people with things.
ReadThe Prompt Is the Brief
Directing AI is exactly like writing a creative brief. Clarity, taste, knowing what you want. 15 years of advertising was training for this moment.
ReadThe Rabbit Hole as Research
Going deep on random topics at 1am isn't procrastination - it's how you end up building things nobody asked for.
ReadThe Reference Library
Every creative person has an internal reference library — decades of consumed culture that inform every decision. Your references ARE your taste.
ReadThe Save Is the Signal
You can like, share, comment - but the save is the only honest action online. Nobody performs a save.
ReadThe Screenshot Folder
Camera roll is 40% screenshots of things seen online. What this habit says about how visual thinkers process the world.
ReadShip, Then Explain
Most people explain forever and never ship. Flip the order. The product is the argument. Nobody needs your pitch if they can use the thing.
ReadThe Stack Doesn't Matter
What did you build it with is the wrong question. What does it do and who is it for is the right one. The obsession with tools is a distraction.
ReadThe Tab Hoarder's Defence
47 open tabs isn't chaos - it's a map of your current obsessions. The browser as creative tool.
ReadTaste Ages
Your taste at 25 is different from your taste at 40. That's not loss — it's refinement. The evolution from more is more to knowing exactly what you want.
ReadTaste Debt
Like technical debt but for aesthetics. Every time you accept good enough, it compounds. One day you look at your product and it doesn't feel like yours.
ReadTaste in Words
Design gets all the credit, but the best brands have a voice you could recognise blindfolded. Copy is a taste decision, not a content decision.
ReadTaste Is Geography
Where you grow up shapes what you value aesthetically. Taste isn't universal — it's regional. Understanding that makes you better at everything you design.
ReadThe Taste You Can't Explain
You know instantly if a website, a restaurant, a brand is right. But try explaining why. The gap between feeling taste and articulating it.
ReadThe Detail Nobody Notices
The kerning on a menu. The weight of a door handle. The sound a car door makes when it closes. Nobody consciously notices — but everybody feels it.
ReadReinvention Is the Point
After 15 years in advertising strategy, I walked away to build products with AI. The gap between careers isn't a void. It's where the most interesting work happens.
ReadThe Link I Sent to Seven People
When you find something so good you have to share it immediately. What that impulse reveals about how your brain works.
ReadThe Skills That Don't Fit on a CV
Taste, obsession, speed, cultural fluency. The qualities that actually make someone worth hiring rarely show up in a job description. Here's what I think matters most.
ReadThe 30-Second Gut Check
You know within seconds whether something is right. That gut reaction isn't random - it's your entire taste library firing at once.
ReadWhen Your Tool Becomes Your Obsession
Claude Code started as a means to an end. Now it's the thing I'm most obsessed with. What happens when the instrument becomes more interesting than the music.
ReadThe Tools Have Taste Too
Notion feels different to Google Docs. Are.na feels different to Pinterest. The curation tool shapes what you curate. Tool choice is a design decision.
ReadThe Trader Joe's Tote Bag
A $2.99 canvas bag became a $500 status symbol. Not because of marketing. Because of taste.
ReadTwo Tastes, One Product
What happens when two people with strong taste disagree on creative direction? The line between productive tension and design-by-committee.
ReadBeyond Minimalism
Everyone worships clean and simple. But minimalism has become a default, not a choice. When everything looks the same, the brave call is more.
ReadVersion One Is Supposed to Be Rough
Every product starts embarrassing. The courage to ship something imperfect, learn, and iterate. Perfectionism is the enemy of shipping.
ReadWhat IKEA Taught the World About Taste
IKEA democratised good design. And in doing so, it taught millions of people what taste looks like — even if they didn't know that's what was happening.
ReadWho Curates the Curators?
Curation is having a moment. But when everyone calls themselves a curator, the word loses meaning. The difference between real curation and just making lists.
ReadThe WHSmith Magazine Aisle
Standing in a newsagent in Nottingham as a kid, choosing which magazine to spend pocket money on. How a WHSmith aisle shaped everything I build today.
ReadThe Internet Lost Curation - And That's the Opportunity
Algorithms replaced human curation. Now the pendulum is swinging back. Why the curator is the most valuable person on the internet.
ReadThe Magazine Era Shaped Everything
How print magazines - The Face, i-D, Dazed - built the taste that now drives everything I create. Before algorithms, there were editors.
ReadWhy I Build Things Nobody Asked For
No market research. No user interviews. No validation. The best products come from scratching your own itch, not chasing someone else's.
ReadThe Non-Coder's Guide to AI Tools
You don't need to know code to build products with AI. You need clarity, taste, and the ability to articulate what you want. Sound familiar?
ReadDesign Is the First Impression That Never Leaves
Typography, spacing, colour, animation - these aren't decoration. They're the product.
ReadWhy Taste Is the Last Unfair Advantage
When everyone can build with AI, what you choose to build and how you design it becomes the differentiator.
ReadLondon Built My Taste
The food, the design, the culture, the pubs. How 15+ years in London shaped the way I see, build, and curate everything.
ReadThe Portfolio Is the New CV
Why showing what you've built matters more than listing where you've worked. Credentials are fading. Craft is forever.
ReadRange Is a Superpower
Pub guide to culture engine to Japanese restaurant finder. Why building across categories isn't scattered - it's strategic. Generalists win.
ReadWhat Football Taught Me About Building
Thirty years of supporting Nottingham Forest - through relegations, near-extinction, and a miraculous return. The parallels with building products are everywhere.
ReadRebuilding the Link Economy
Bookmarking is broken. Social sharing is broken. The tools we need to manage links and discover content barely exist. I'm building the replacements.
ReadShip It Saturday
Why weekends are my superpower. How compressed time, high energy, and self-imposed deadlines create better products than unlimited time ever could.
ReadWhat Advertising Taught Me About Building Products
How 15+ years in ad agencies prepared me for product building. The skills are more transferable than you would think.
ReadWhy Every Strategist Should Build Something
Building products gives strategists real empathy for what they're recommending. Stop advising. Start making.
ReadThe Feed We Choose Next
Social feeds are dying. Chronological is back. Why human-curated feeds beat algorithmic ones. The RSS renaissance.
ReadHot Chocolate, Not Coffee: Against Productivity Culture
A manifesto against hustle culture. I don't drink coffee. I drink hot chocolate. And I ship 14 products.
ReadWhat Wes Anderson Taught Me About Product Design
Symmetry, colour palette restrictions, attention to background details. How film aesthetics apply to web design.
ReadThe Curator's Manifesto
Curation as a creative act, not just collecting. The internet has an abundance problem, and curators are the new creators.
ReadThe 15-Year Pivot
From agency strategist to product builder at 40. Not a career change - a career evolution. Why experience IS the advantage.
ReadYour Bookmarks Are Your Autobiography
What you save says more about you than what you share. The case for treating bookmarks as a personal archive, not a junk drawer.
ReadDesigning for Obsessives
Why niche products beat mass market ones. Forest fans, pub enthusiasts, Japanese food nerds. Build for the obsessed.
ReadWhat Print Magazines Got Right About the Internet
Editors, not algorithms. Curation, not aggregation. Finite, not infinite scroll. Everything print did that the web forgot.
ReadSide Projects Are the New MBA
Why building 14 products taught more than any business school could. Shipping beats studying. Doing beats debating.
ReadThe Taste Stack
Introducing the concept of a taste stack - the layers of influences, experiences, and obsessions that form your creative identity.
ReadThe Collector's Instinct
The deep human urge to collect - books, links, records, magazines. How collecting is pattern recognition in disguise.
ReadWhy I Chose Ugly Problems Over Pretty Ones
Building a tube exit guide, a pub directory, a children's activity finder. Not sexy. But useful. Why solving mundane problems beats chasing shiny ones.
ReadThe Gap Between Idea and URL
The journey from 'wouldn't it be cool if...' to a live product. What actually happens in between. Why most ideas die and how to keep them alive.
ReadJapan Taught Me to Pay Attention
How Japanese culture - food, design, craft, service - shaped my obsession with detail. The connection between Oishii London and a deeper philosophy.
ReadYour Best Ideas Deserve Better Than a Deck
15 years writing strategy decks that nobody read. Why building the thing is the best strategy document. Show, don't present.
ReadThe Sunday Test
If you wouldn't use your own product on a lazy Sunday, it's not good enough. The personal utility bar every side project should clear.
ReadDigital Spaces Need Interior Design
Websites need the same care as physical spaces - lighting, furniture, atmosphere, personality. The interior design of the internet.
ReadThe Nottingham-to-London Pipeline
Growing up in Nottingham, moving to London, and how that journey shaped a worldview. Small city hunger meets big city opportunity.
ReadFourteen Products, One Question
Looking at all 14 products and asking: what's the thread? The answer is curation, taste, and making sense of abundance.
ReadLetter to My Future Employer
An open letter to whoever hires Mike next. What you're getting, what you're not, and why this portfolio IS the interview.
ReadThe Slack Channel as Crystal Ball
How analysing Slack channels reveals what people actually care about vs what they say they care about. The hidden signal in workplace chat.
ReadBuild the Gallery Before You Make the Art
Why distribution and presentation matter as much as creation. The container shapes the content.
ReadThe 3am Wikipedia Rabbit Hole
A love letter to curiosity. How following random threads leads to unexpected connections.
ReadAdvertising's Next Life
The industry is unrecognisable. But the core skills are more valuable than ever. Just in new containers.
ReadThe One-Person Product Team
How to be the PM, designer, developer, marketer, and support team simultaneously. What you gain and what you lose.
ReadEvery City Has a Font
How typography and cities share personality. A design essay about urban character.
ReadThe Anti-Portfolio
For every project in my portfolio, three ideas got edited out. What the cutting room floor reveals about taste, creative editing, and knowing when to stop.
ReadRSS Is the Quiet Rebellion
While everyone argues about algorithms, RSS quietly does its job. The most punk technology on the internet.
ReadWhat My Son Taught Me About UX
Watching toddlers use iPads is a masterclass in intuitive design. Real usability lessons from parenting.
ReadThe Last Page of the Internet
If the internet had a final page, what would be on it? A meditation on digital permanence and what survives.
ReadBuilders Don't Wait for Briefs
Why traditional creative briefs fail in a build-first world. When you can go from thought to URL in a day, the brief becomes a relic of a slower era.
ReadLondon Restaurants Are Better Products Than Most Apps
What the best London restaurants teach about product design. The parallels between great dining and great UX are everywhere - if you know where to look.
ReadAI Can Make Anything - But It Can't Want Anything
The paradox at the heart of AI creation. AI tools can generate infinite content, but they have no desire, no taste, no reason to prefer one thing over another.
ReadBuild What You Actually Need
The best products come from solving problems you personally experience. How building for your own needs creates better products than any user research deck.
ReadThe Best Brands Feel Like People You'd Want to Know
Why brands with personality always win. From fifteen years in advertising, the brands that endure are the ones with genuine, human-feeling personality.
ReadAttention Is Currency, And Taste Is How You Spend It
The real economics of what people choose to look at. It's not about capturing attention - it's about deserving it.
ReadThe Five-Minute Rule - If I Can't Explain It, I Shouldn't Build It
Simplicity as a product filter. If you can't explain it in five minutes, it's too complicated.
ReadDesign Systems for Life - When Product Thinking Escapes the Screen
How design systems thinking applies beyond software. Consistency, reusable patterns, and intentional constraints.
ReadThe Optimist's Operating System
Belief, creativity and optimism are amongst our most powerful technologies. We can use them to reboot Britain
ReadNostalgia Is Strategy - Looking Backward to Build Forward
Why looking backward is the smartest way to build forward. The past contains things the present has forgotten.
ReadForty and Building - On Starting Late and Starting Right
On starting to build things at an age when you're supposed to have it figured out. Starting later means starting with a head start.
ReadTaste Is Editing - What You Leave Out Matters More
Taste isn't about what you include - it's about what you cut. The best menus, albums, portfolios, and products are defined by what is missing.
ReadThe Pub as Product - What Pubs Teach About Community
The British pub is the original community product. What digital products can learn from a place that has retention without trying.
ReadThe Bookmarks Worth Revisiting - Why We Save Things We Never Revisit
Everyone has hundreds of bookmarks they'll never look at again. But what if the pattern of what you save revealed something about who you're?
ReadWhy Shipping Beats Perfecting
Perfectionism is procrastination in a nicer outfit. The gap between good enough and perfect is where most projects die.
ReadScreen Time Well Spent - Building Things Worth Looking At
The conversation about screen time is always negative. But the same device that wastes your time can be the most powerful creative tool ever made.
ReadYour Font Choice Says More Than Your Copy
Typography is the first thing people feel, before they read a single word. Why your font choice is the most important design decision you'll make.
ReadBuild for an Audience of One - Then See Who Else Shows Up
Every product I built started by solving my own problem. I'm user zero. The most honest product research is scratching your own itch.
ReadColour Is Feeling - The Palette Decisions Nobody Notices
Four accent colours across fourteen products. One background tone that isn't quite white. Every colour choice is a micro-decision about how something feels.
ReadYour Tools Shape Your Thinking - Choose Carefully
Claude Code changed how I think about building. Before AI tools, ideas stayed as ideas. Now the gap between concept and execution is a conversation.
ReadThe Ten-Year Taste Test - What Survives and What Does Not
What would you still recommend from ten years ago? The books, albums, restaurants, websites that have aged well - and the ones that have not. A reflection on what lasts.
ReadThe Walk Test - Why the Best Ideas Happen Away From Screens
How walking unlocks creative thinking. The best product ideas, strategy frameworks, and design solutions come when you close the laptop and go outside.
ReadYour Work Is Your Best Introduction
How building things and putting them on the internet creates better professional connections than any business card ever could.
ReadRetail Is Theatre - Why the Best Shops Are Designed Experiences
Physical retail spaces as curated experiences - from Supreme's drop culture to Aesop's store design. Why great retail is closer to art direction than commerce.
ReadPlaylists Are Portfolios - What Your Music Says About Your Taste
How music playlists are really taste statements. The curation involved in a good playlist mirrors the curation involved in a good portfolio.
ReadSecond Screen Culture - We Never Just Watch Anything Anymore
The death of single-screen attention. We watch football with Twitter open. We watch films while checking Letterboxd. What this means for attention, culture, and product design.
ReadNaming Things Is Hard - And It Matters More Than You Think
The obsessive process of naming products and projects. Why the right name shapes everything that follows - and why most names fail before the product even launches.
ReadHow Instagram Reshaped Our Taste
How Instagram flattened aesthetics, democratised design taste, and became the most influential design tool ever made. The complicated legacy of the visual internet.
ReadThe Morning Scroll - My Daily Information Ritual
The first thing I do every morning is open Twitter. A love letter to the morning scroll, a defence of being Very Online, and why the timeline still matters.
ReadCollecting vs Hoarding - When Does Saving Everything Become a Problem
The digital magpie problem. When does thoughtful collection become mindless hoarding? The difference between a library and a landfill, and how tools should help you sort the signal from the noise.
ReadThe Small Internet - Why Building Tiny Things Online Still Matters
Against scale. Against virality. For building small, personal, considered internet things. A defence of projects that serve ten people brilliantly rather than ten million people adequately.
ReadProof I Am Not Just Talk - Why Strategists Need to Build
After 15 years of writing decks and presenting strategies, I needed to prove I could actually make something. The gap between recommending and doing.
ReadThe Observer Who Started Building - On Watching vs Making
I've always been the person noticing things - the fonts, the lighting, the vibe. But observing isn't enough anymore. On the transition from watching to making.
ReadWhen Taste Is the Only Input - Building With AI as a Non-Coder
When AI does the making, all that's left is your judgement. Your taste is fully exposed. Every decision reveals what you value.
ReadHead of Culture - The Role That Should Exist Everywhere
Why every brand with physical products needs a Head of Culture. Not a CMO, not a brand manager - someone whose job is to connect brand, product, and culture into one coherent thing.
ReadThe Silent Builder Economy
Millions of people are building real products outside work hours. Not side hustles. Not weekend hobbies. Actual shipped products that compete with funded startups. This is the next creative class.
ReadWhen Taste Needs a Business Model
Magma bookshop in Farringdon and Covent Garden is gone. Design books, indie magazines, zines - curated not stocked. What happens when the places that shape culture can't survive commercially.
ReadSeeing What Matters - The Skill Nobody Teaches
The ability to scan 100 things and know which 3 matter. Where this skill comes from, why it's impossible to put on a CV, and why it's the thing that makes everything work.
ReadThe Recommender in Chief - Why I Cannot Stop Sending Links
The most Mike thing ever: always recommending things. Sending articles, products, restaurants, albums to anyone who will listen. Why recommending is a love language and what it has to do with everything I build.
ReadCoherence - The Quality That Separates Good From Great
The most important quality in any product: coherence. Everything fits together - name, design, tone, experience. Nothing jars. Why most products fail this test and what it looks like when they pass.
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