How my life & views have changed
I have been writing this blog since 2008. That is over 18 years of posts — technical tutorials, product reviews, open apologies, legal battles, carbon footprints, and the odd bit of duck bacon. Reading back through them is a strange experience. Some posts make me cringe. Others surprise me with how much I still believe the same things. A few hit harder than expected.
This is my attempt to trace the arc.
2000–2012: Primary school ICT
I started working in ICT for primary schools in 2000 and founded Primary Technology in 2004. By the time I started writing here in 2008 I had been doing this for eight years and was deep enough in the world that I thought I had most of the answers. I talked at conferences, I was enthusiastic about almost every new thing: VLEs, learning platforms, Google Apps, interactive whiteboards, Android. If it was new and it touched education, I was probably writing a blog post about it.
Looking back, I was earnest to a fault. There was a post where I called Windows 7 genuinely inspiring. I meant it at the time.
The enthusiasm was real but it was not always well-directed. In 2011 I published an open apology to Bradford schools for the damage I had caused by mis-selling learning platforms as a legal requirement. Schools spent money they did not have to spend because I repeated something I had been told without doing my own homework. That post was uncomfortable to write. I still think it was necessary. The lesson was not just about VLEs — it was about the gap between confidence and competence, and how easy it is to confuse the two when you are young and moving fast.
The views I held then about open source, interoperability, and avoiding vendor lock-in have aged better. I still believe that a school depending on a single proprietary platform for all its digital needs is building on sand.
2011–2012: Hard years and honest reckoning
By 2011 the shine had come off a few things.
A former employee left without notice, took two client schools with them, and then filed a constructive dismissal claim against me personally. The case was dismissed when the claimant did not appear at the tribunal, but we were still left significantly out of pocket in legal fees. I wrote about it publicly — the full story is here — because I believe in transparency and because staying silent felt dishonest. That post got a lot of pushback. I do not regret it.
That same year I had genetic testing done through 23andMe. I found out I had a significantly elevated risk for psoriasis (already showing early symptoms), above-average risk for prostate cancer, Alzheimer’s and a few other things. I posted the results. People thought I was strange for doing that. My view then was the same as my view now: knowledge about your own health is not something to be ashamed of, and the more people share this kind of data, the better the science gets.
I also gave up on Google as a vendor in December 2011. I could not contact them, could not report a bug, could not pay them to improve a product I depended on. That specific frustration has come and gone over the years, but the underlying lesson — that depending on a service you cannot communicate with is a structural risk — has stayed with me.
In 2012 I took the whole of August off technology. Entirely. Analogue August was inspired by Tim Rylands and it was one of the better decisions I have made. The month off reminded me that my instinct to reach for a screen first was a habit more than a need, and that the parts of life I had been neglecting — the house, the garden, relationships, sleep — did not fix themselves while I was online.
That September I turned 30 and stepped down as Managing Director of Primary Technology. The team had been running things since October 2011 anyway. I left a note — Adios Amigos — and went quiet for a while.
2013–2020: Everything on one ring
The NFC Ring / McLear Ltd consumed seven years of my life.
I spent most of my savings on a product that did not yet exist in a market that did not yet exist, took VC funding by selling 16% equity, launched a Kickstarter in July 2013 and watched it raise enough to prove the idea was real. By the time I launched the second Kickstarter in 2015, I had put in about £144k and would not see a penny back unless we raised over £200k. I married during this period. I ate a lot of curry. Those are, in the 2015 post, the two other benchmarks I gave for the intervening years.
Along the way, in 2016, I also stepped back from Etherpad. Four years, over 100 plugins, around 30,000 lines of core code, roughly 1,500 commits. I am proud of the contribution. I am also glad I stepped back when I did rather than letting the project drag me along past the point where I had real energy for it.
The ring project taught me things that no amount of reading about entrepreneurship would have. Risk is different when it is your actual savings and not a business school case study. Passion does not substitute for timing. A Kickstarter campaign is a lot of things — community builder, market validator, manufacturing deposit — but it is not a business plan. McLear Ltd wound down in 2020. I do not regret doing it. I would do several things differently.
2020–2024: Renewable projects
In 2020 I started properly investing in the Grade 2 listed house I live in. By 2022 I had spent around £70k reducing the building’s heat loss from 33kW to 15kW — insulation, secondary glazing, new doors, pointing, oversized radiators — and another £10k on solar and battery storage. I wrote up the details here. The renewable work continued through to 2024.
This project shifted something in me. I care about energy independence in a way I did not when I was writing posts about which Android phone had the best camera. Long term I want the house to be as close to energy-independent as a 19th-century listed building in West Yorkshire can reasonably be.
The change in priorities here is real. In 2009 I was posting about wind turbines as a future project. By 2024 I had spent four years actually doing it — solar panels, battery storage, heat reduction, and wrangling DNO paperwork. It took longer than I expected and cost more than I planned, which is true of most things worth doing.
2024–present: Back to hardware
The blog has quietly shifted in the last couple of years toward hardware — ESPHome, ESP32, PN532 NFC readers, Home Assistant integrations. I have been building and fixing things at a fairly low level: monitoring NFC reader availability, writing a replacement PN532 component because the upstream version had bugs that had been open for years.
This feels like a return to something. When I was young I wanted to understand how things worked at the lowest practical level. That instinct went dormant for a while during the years of running companies and managing people and raising Kickstarter campaigns. It is back now.
What has actually changed
The things that have not changed: I still live in Bradford. I still think open source is important. I still believe that being transparent about failure is more useful than pretending it did not happen. I still think vendor lock-in is a structural problem, not just an inconvenience.
The things that have changed: I am more patient with complexity. I am less impressed by novelty for its own sake. I have learned to finish things, or at least to be honest with myself when I am not going to. I take breaks. I care more about the physical world — the house, the garden, the energy systems — than I did in 2008 when I was writing about learning management systems.
I am also more comfortable not having an opinion on everything. The 2009 version of me would post about almost any technology product and declare a verdict. These days I would rather spend that time actually using something and finding out where it breaks.
The blog is a reasonable record. Not complete, not always accurate in retrospect, but honest. If you want to understand how someone’s thinking changes over time, reading what they published when they thought no one important was watching is a decent place to start.
I am glad I kept writing.