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.

Sorry to parrot on about Apple, but this judge ruling that Apple’s App Store practices violate their antitrust ruling just drills home my point that they’re abusing their market position.

Apple’s been hit with a €500 million fine — the price of malicious compliance, perhaps.

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.

Dispensing with all niceties, let’s get straight to the point: hiring the wrong person can be a disaster.

I’ve been a software engineer for over a decade.

I’ve built products used by millions. I’ve led teams, mentored junior engineers, scaled startups, grown insane databases. It used to be exciting. Now, I’m not so sure.