I don't just geek out with software. When I'm not thinking about code, architecture, or how to help teams deliver better, you'll find me cooking, behind a camera, on the decks, or up in the air with a drone.
Capturing light and moments is something I find genuinely meditative. Whether it's landscape, street, or portrait work, photography forces you to slow down and really look at your surroundings. I shoot mostly with a mirrorless system and do my own post-processing.
Flying a drone combines the technical challenge of understanding airspace rules and flight dynamics with the creative eye of photography. There's something uniquely satisfying about getting a shot from an angle that simply wasn't possible a decade ago. I hold a GVC licence for commercial operations.
I've been playing music to friends and family for years. There's real craft in reading a room and sequencing tracks to take people on a journey. I focus mainly on house and electronic music, though my collection spans a lot of ground. The gear has changed enormously over the years — vinyl to CDJs to controllers — but the joy hasn't.
Cooking is one of those activities that demands presence — you can't half-pay-attention and expect great results. I love experimenting with different cuisines, and there's a strong overlap with the engineer's mindset: understand the fundamentals, then you can improvise. A good knife, fresh ingredients, and enough time are all you really need.
I read a mix of technical books, leadership and management writing, and fiction. A few books have genuinely changed how I think: The Phoenix Project, Thinking in Systems, and Team Topologies all sit on a well-thumbed shelf. Reading regularly is probably the single biggest contributor to professional growth outside of doing the work itself.
An extension of photography, video adds motion and time as creative dimensions. I enjoy editing as much as shooting — the rhythm of a good edit, pacing cuts to music, finding the narrative in raw footage. I use a combination of handheld and drone footage to tell visual stories about places and events.