Why I Build Things

I've had a strange career. I started as a developer in London, building systems for banks. Then I became a sales engineer. It sounds like a demotion. It wasn't. I got paid to understand complex systems and explain them to people who needed to understand them. AppDynamics, Confluent, DataRobot, now Elastic.

Somewhere along the way I moved to Buffalo, New York. I met my wife there. We live in a converted 1860s Quaker meeting house now, which tells you something about my taste. I like things that were built to last.

That's why I still build things, even though my job title says "Product Marketing." I write demo generators so salespeople can show real scenarios instead of slides. I build instrumentation tools because I spent years watching developers struggle with observability. I hack on side projects because that's how I learn.

My first real project was a wireless heart rate monitor. This was 2005, when that meant writing Symbian C++ for Nokia phones and figuring out Bluetooth from spec sheets. I won a prize for it. I've been chasing that feeling ever since: making something work that didn't work before.

Right now I'm mostly thinking about OpenTelemetry. Open standards for telemetry data mean you're not locked into any vendor's view of the world. You can own your data. I've written about this on the Elastic blog.

I keep my projects on GitHub. Most of them are tools for generating demo data, instrumenting applications, or making observability easier. Some of them are weird side projects, like voice control for my Steam Deck. I ship things constantly because that's the only way to learn what actually works.

If you're reading this, you probably found me through work. That's fine. But this site exists because I wanted a place that wasn't LinkedIn, wasn't a corporate bio, wasn't optimized for anything. Just a place to put things I've made and thoughts I've had.

Like the meeting house.