The machine that didn’t let you down
The computer arrived before I was ready for it. A Commodore 64, already ancient by the time it reached my hands, passed down from my uncle who was only a few years older than me and hardly better off. By the time it made its way to me it was several generations out of date. I didn’t care. The moment I typed something in and something happened, the world got a little smaller and a little more manageable.
I was eight. Between the ages of six and eleven I hadn’t attended any formal education. Home life on the estate was unstable; my parents were in the grip of addiction, and the things that were supposed to anchor a childhood mostly weren’t there. What I had instead was a keyboard, a screen, and old beaten up coding books I taught myself from. Looking back, it wasn’t really a hobby. It was the most reliable thing in my world. You put something in, you get something back. It doesn’t cancel on you. It doesn’t disappear.
“Type the right words into this mysterious box, and things happen.”
I moved from the Commodore to HTML, then to PHP, building fan sites for Command & Conquer, tinkering with RPG Maker, learning by breaking things and quietly fixing them before anyone noticed. What started as escape became obsession. Obsession, eventually, became vocation.
My first proper website went live in 2001. Twenty-five years later, I’m still building.
The headteacher’s office, and other promotions
The first time I made someone say wow — really say it — I was in secondary school, running a flash games portal for my friends and a small network of proxy servers to route around the IT department’s filters. Inevitably, I was called in. What I expected was a detention. What I got was a job offer: would I like to work on the school’s official website instead?
I took that as a win.
Around the same time I was running a Command & Conquer fan site with five thousand members, a forum, and a mod community that hosted some of the most respected work in the scene. Five thousand felt small to me then; I didn’t fully understand what I’d built. What it did teach me, unexpectedly, was community. Even in a close-knit space, people bring their grievances, their drama, their need to belong somewhere. A big part of the job, a part nobody tells you about, is just making the room feel safe.
I also got to interview Frank Klepacki, the composer behind the iconic scores of the games, by email. He was gracious and generous in a way he absolutely didn’t have to be, given I was in all likelihood a mild annoyance to his inbox. At the time I probably undersold what that meant. It meant a lot.
“I never let them know I was just twelve years old.”
At twelve, I put a website up for sale on a forum. Someone bought it for £750. I spent the money immediately on a new computer, got it home, plugged the wrong voltage in, and blew it on the spot. My uncle was in the room. He still brings it up.
Things people rely on
Along the way I’ve built companies with a combined turnover of over £50 million, though that number has always felt less interesting to me than the question of whether what I built actually mattered to anyone.
StatusCake, a website monitoring platform I grew from nothing with my business partner, ended up in the infrastructure of NASA, the Discovery Channel, and the British Government. When those names started appearing in our dashboard, it was the first time I could look up from the work and think: actually, I’m doing alright. The moment I saw “StatusCake knowledge” listed as a requirement on someone else’s job application, I giggled. Genuinely giggled. It’s still running today, used by tens of thousands, though I’ve since moved on.
Today I run BookingNinja, which handles over £5 million in transactions daily for hospitality venues, from large chains to small family-run spots that have become genuinely important to their communities. BookingNinja isn’t just software; it’s a support framework built around real relationships. The code matters. The people behind it matter more.
I also run GoPiglet, a customer support platform growing quickly on similar principles, and I founded Playopolis, a board game café in Kent now owned and run by my sister.
I work alongside my partner Sarah, whose talents in 3D modelling, vector graphics, and traditional art bring a creative dimension that code alone can’t provide. Where my instinct is to solve problems in logic, hers is to make things feel like something. It’s the combination that makes the work different.
Projects I’ve been involved in have been featured in The Guardian, The Metro, and on the BBC. I’ve worked with the UK Security Services and contributed early community-driven patches to Minecraft. Both are cool.
The doors I didn’t walk through
Not everything works out. I think that’s worth saying plainly, because the internet is full of people who only show you the wins.
There was Summerford, a survival horror game set in an abandoned English village evacuated after some unnamed disaster. A passion project built with family, inspired by the classics. We poured ourselves into it. But feature creep is a patient enemy, and the scope kept expanding until the finish line disappeared. Then 2020 arrived, and the game’s central premise — deserted streets, isolation, a world that felt suddenly emptied out — stopped being fiction. It hit too close. The project stalled. It may yet return; I’ve recently started updating the codebase for modern systems, and I haven’t stopped believing in it.
There was Treeple Studios, a year spent with talented people trying to carve out a space in VR game reviews. We believed in it. The market just wasn’t there yet, and the audience never followed. Passion alone doesn’t build a crowd if the timing is wrong.
“The only person who ever really believed I shouldn’t be in the room was me.”
But the failures that stay with me most are the doors I didn’t walk through. At nineteen, a major PC gaming company invited me to join them. The calls were exciting and every part of me wanted to say yes. Instead, imposter syndrome quietly took the wheel, and I stopped returning their calls. I’ve turned down an invitation to represent the UK at a world-leading technology convention. I’ve let sizeable opportunities dissolve because I couldn’t quite believe I deserved them.
I grew up on a council estate with no formal qualifications. For years I assumed that eventually someone would look past what I’d built and see where I’d come from, and that would be that. I know, rationally, that’s not how it works. The doubt wears different clothes now. But it’s quieter than it used to be.
Summerford taught me the cost of saying yes to every feature. Treeple taught me that timing matters as much as talent. The doors I didn’t open taught me something harder to name — something about the difference between the stories we tell about ourselves and the ones that are actually true.
I’m still working on that last one.
the web
across ventures
through BookingNinja
Got a project in mind?
I’m drawn to work that offers a genuine challenge — the kind of problem that doesn’t have an obvious answer. I’m also especially keen to help people who’ve traditionally found it difficult to get online.
Not every great idea comes with a tech budget. Some of the most rewarding things I’ve built started with someone who simply had a problem worth solving.
If that sounds like you, let’s chat.