Picture this: past 5:30 pm, office lights buzzing overhead, I’m still logged into work. One eye is focussed on a crashing WordPress error log and the other on a WhatsApp group where members are yelling that they can’t RSVP. For the past eight weeks, a standing It’s Culture Innit trustee call has eaten up my late afternoons.

Let’s talk about Geebos – Generic Business Objects (GBOs).

Every product has them; they’re the nouns in your system.
For a dead-simple to-do app: User → List → Task – that’s your geebo set.

Recent events reminded me of a lesson I learned the hard way: don’t take the cloud call. I’m not going to unpack them here. It lit up a part of my brain that’s all too familiar with what comes next.

I just watched my father try to use a furniture website. Not a banking site, not a secure government portal — a furniture site. He clicked through from Google Shopping, only to be met immediately with a CAPTCHA. Not a simple one — a frustrating, overly complex verification that made him give up entirely and leave the site.

I have been thinking about the kind of software companies I’d want to back - and it starts with the tools I actually use day to day. My own stack isn’t built atop a mega-suite I get from Microsoft or Google. It’s sticky-taped together from a set of focussed, well-made apps that are each good at one thing. They don’t pretend to do everything and that’s exactly why they’re good.

I’ve made some edits on 8 May 2025 to clarify some points I’ve made - I was worried that I have discounted the hard work that goes into building products and I wanted to make sure I was clear on that. I’ve left my original wording in here for reference. I don’t intend to make offence, but I want to be honest about the challenges we face. I may have done that unintentionally. I apologise and have amended my wording to add clarity.

This post will be a bit different for me because it’s not even remotely about my usual technology & startup rants.

I used to build sites in PHP & HTML. I’d deploy them to a web server over FTP and that was it. But starting out today feels paradoxically both harder and easier than ever before.

BunnyCDN is based in Slovenia. It’s the first serious European challenger to Cloudflare. It doesn’t do everything Cloudflare does, but it’s excellent at what it offers.

For years, iCloud Mail has been sold as a seamless extension of the Apple ecosystem. It’s private, it’s secure and it just works. In reality, though, it’s broken.