Sound, software, and the mind
Three chapters, and I went properly deep in each — a decade in one of them, not a tasting menu. A career in sound, then ten years building software, then psychology. What I didn't plan, and only saw later, is how much each one turned out to be training for the next. The same instinct runs the length of all three: a need to understand how people work, and to build something with the answer rather than just write it down.
Sound first
I started in music — acoustics, recording, performing, then a distinction in creative music technology building granular synthesis tools in C++. It taught me the thing I've never un-learned: that what you make is judged by how it feels to use, not how clever it is underneath. A beautiful architecture nobody enjoys is a failure. That bias has shaped everything since.
Then a decade building Nimble
I co-founded Nimble Elearning and spent ten years as its CTO — from nothing to 6,000+ clients, a multi-million-pound business, ISO 27001. I architected the platform, led the engineering, owned the product, and eventually sold my stake and stepped away. The real lesson wasn't technical. It's that almost every hard problem in software is actually a human one wearing a technical costume — and I wanted to understand the human half properly.
So, back to the mind
That sent me to study it head-on: an MSc in Psychological Sciences at Brunel, a diploma in Psychosynthesis, and a long detour through the cognitive science of wisdom. Research methods, clinical frameworks (ACT, IFS, CBT), and a dissertation on how our sense of our future selves shapes what we do now. I went in half-expecting to leave tech behind. I came out realising it was the missing half of the same craft — not a replacement for it.
Now — building at the seam
Which is where I am: building software at the seam where engineering meets the inner life — what I now think of as building for sensemaking. The unusual part isn't any single credential — plenty of people have a better one of each. It's that they overlap in one person. Most CTOs can't brief a clinical idea; most people trained in psychology have never shipped to thousands of paying customers. I keep building at that join because almost nobody else is standing there, and it turns out to be a fertile place.
Credentials, for the record
Co-founder & CTO of Nimble Elearning (2009–2020) — 6,000+ clients, ISO 27001, several industry awards. Member of the British Psychological Society and the Society of Research Software Engineering.