Backend & Systems
Designing services and the logic that holds them together. This is where I'm most at home and most useful.
I build backend systems in Java and Spring — and I'm drawn to the parts other people skip: the edge cases, the data, the point where a system finally behaves the way you promised it would.
Also, for the record: a fairly reliable travel planner, and a gloriously unreliable finisher of book series.
I learn by doing — usually by saying yes before I quite know how.
That one habit has walked me across backend systems, API development, and full-stack work, and lately toward the AI side of the craft. I don't rush it. I'd rather understand a thing properly than only well enough to move past it.
The result is an engineer who's comfortable in unfamiliar territory — because getting through the unfamiliar part is exactly where the skill actually sticks.
Where I'm strongest, and where I'm honestly still broadening — framed the way I'd actually describe it.
Designing services and the logic that holds them together. This is where I'm most at home and most useful.
Building the contracts that let systems talk to each other cleanly — designing, exposing, and connecting APIs.
Built a business application from the ground up, including full internationalization with the i18n library.
Comfortable operating here — an overview rather than from-scratch, and steadily growing into it.
I like to learn a new idea by building it — and, when I can, by building it in a stack I already trust.
I've been following the AI curve as an engineer — reading into the Model Context Protocol and wanting to understand it from the inside. So I built an experimental microservice: an AI client that talks to a local LLM through Ollama, and keeps its conversation memory two ways at once — stored raw, and modelled as a graph — with PostgreSQL and pgvector underneath.
The interesting part was the decision. Every tutorial reaches for Python. I reached for Spring Boot — the framework I know deeply — because I wanted to learn the concept of a context engine, not learn a whole new language at the same time. Understand the idea first; the rest follows.
How friends and colleagues tend to describe me — with the reasons behind it, not just the labels.
On a trip I'll dig into the place — its people, food, history — then come back and explain it to whoever will listen.
I rarely turn down unfamiliar work. The obstacles are the point — getting through them is how a new skill becomes mine.
I'm the friend who's handed the group's money on a trip. It's a small thing, but I take it quietly seriously.
I end up running the trip — routes, transport, places to stay — so everyone else can just show up and enjoy it.
Mostly casually, on my own timeline. I get to things eventually — and enjoy them no less for arriving late.
Cosmos documentaries for the wonder of it, not to track the science. Fictional worlds pull me in — Harry Potter, Dan Brown, Game of Thrones — but only the ones that truly grab me. I reached Westeros years after everyone else, and loved it just the same.
I like catching nature and the people I'm travelling with. No professional gear, no rush to make it serious — just an eye I trust. Somewhere on the list: telling a whole story in photographs, with no words at all.
I build things on the side as much out of curiosity as ambition — partly to sharpen a skill, partly because I'd simply rather be making something than sitting idle.
A running list I add to and slowly work through. Filter it however you like.
Field note — Indonesia A manta ray glided about fifteen feet beneath me, and a sea turtle surfaced barely seven feet away. "Mesmerising" is the honest word for it.