Blog

Thoughts on software engineering, leadership, and technology.

Using Claude as a First-Class Interface for Squirrel Notes

Using Claude as a First-Class Interface for Squirrel Notes When I built Squirrel Notes, the MCP integration wasn't part of the original plan. It came later, as a practical itch: I was already using Claude daily, I had a notes app I actually liked, and I kept context-switching between the two. The obvious fix was to connect them. What wasn't obvious was how to do it without undermining the entire…

8 April 2026aisoftware-developmentproductivitynotessecurity

How Squirrel Notes Keeps Your Data Private

How Squirrel Notes Keeps Your Data Private When I set out to build Squirrel Notes, the first requirement on my list wasn't sync, or markdown support, or even cost. It was this: I don't want my service to know anything about anything. That's a pretty blunt way to describe end-to-end encryption, but it captures the intent exactly. I'm building a notes app. I have no business reading your notes.…

29 March 2026software-developmentproductivitynotessecurity

Introducing Squirrel Notes

How I build and released Squirrel Notes with Claude Code and Copilot. Use it for free at Squirrel Notes. !Squirrel Notes My first foray into AI-assisted software development Background As a currently hands-off engineering leader, I haven't had much real time during work hours to stay on top of AI software development — something that was starting to make me feel quite uncomfortable. The problem —…

26 March 2026aisoftware-developmentproductivitynotes

How to Build Your Interview Process

In this post, I will outline processes that I believe will enhance your interviewing procedures. This is based on 20 years of experience, 10 of which have been in leadership roles involving interviewing. Keep it Short Unless you are Google or Amazon, candidates may not be specifically eager to work for you, so let's not pretend this is a prestigious opportunity. They are likely interviewing at…

21 December 2025interviewingsoftware-developmentprocess-improvement

Why Your Developer Interview Process Is Shit

The year 2026 marks my 20th anniversary as a Software Developer. I started in 2006 at a company called TechnoPhobia in Sheffield. My interview process there was interesting, to say the least. I was hired from a set of 2nd-year university students because I was one of the nerdiest-looking ones. I don’t actually remember much about that interview other than being warned by my housemate at the time…

20 December 2025programming-blogsinterviewingsoftware-developmentsoftware-engineering

musictutorsofsydney.org - GitHub pages

!musictutorsofsydney.org Predicatably I haven’t blogged much in the last year. Just pushing this update on a small side project I recently completed - https://musictutorsofsydney.org/. It’s suprisingly easy to create a fairly complex website entirely free with Jekyll on github pages. The only thing you actually need to pay for is the domain name.…

19 September 2025development

Why rebuilding software is (usually) a bad idea

This was originally going to be a presentation I put together for work, but I shelved that for now and decided to create a blog post with roughly the same content. Images are, of course, courtesy of ChatGPT. My company (prior to me joining) embarked on the journey of trying to rebuild the core platform, and it did not go as planned. Here, I will outline why this is so often the case and suggest…

3 December 2024engineeringsoftware-developmentsoftware-engineering

Cutting Cloud Costs: Transforming Legacy Systems with Event-Driven Architecture

I previously worked for A-League, and during my time there we launched aleagues.com.au and migrated all the club websites to a WordPress platform developed by a third party. The system we inherited had a set of APIs deployed into AWS. Games, Teams, and Competitions were imported from a third-party provider via EventBridge and a series of Lambdas. The data was stored in MongoDB, then surfaced via…

18 November 2024awscost-optimisationevent-driven-architecture

Goodbye Jekyll, Hello Hashnode

Continuing my usual routine of blogging, where I write an entry then come back 6 to 12 months later, the first thing I do is try and get my Jekyll blog to work locally and then waste several hours wrestling with Ruby only to then repeat the process in Github actions when it inevitably fails to deploy. I decided to just switch to a hosted platform, I spent some time dabbling with wordpress.com…

15 November 2024bloggingwordpresshashnode

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