About

Hello, I'm
Ryan.

Location — Cambridgeshire, UK
Title — Senior Software Engineer
Alignment — Chaotic Helpful
Class — Rogue / Arcanist multiclass
01 / The short version

I write software for a living and I write more software when I get home. Most of what I make starts as a tiny itch — an auction mechanic I want to understand, a tool my D&D group could use, a joke about every bad checkout flow I've ever sat through.

I like things small, readable, and a little bit strange. I like dark themes, long debugging sessions with a good soundtrack, and the moment a feature clicks into place.

02 / The longer version

By day I'm a senior engineer — owning systems, mentoring, making decisions about tradeoffs that nobody's going to write a blog post about. By night I'm usually deep in a Pathfinder rulebook, or tinkering with the home-lab, or deliberately playing a healer I have no business playing.

I don't have a brand. I don't have a niche. What I have is a list of little projects I want to build, and the stubbornness to actually ship a few of them.

This site is the shelf they live on.

What I do best
Building things that are small enough to finish
What I'm practicing
Writing less code and shipping more often
What's on the desk right now
LolBuy — every bad checkout decision
A rough timeline

How I got here.

now
Senior Software Engineer
Owning services, making calls, trying to write docs that people actually read.
a few years ago
Started DM'ing Pathfinder
Turns out running a campaign is just distributed systems with more snacks.
earlier
Mid-level engineer, many tabs, many teams
Learned that the most useful skill is explaining a thing twice.
before that
Junior dev, first real job
Broke production, fixed production, wrote the postmortem, grew up a little.
way before
A kid messing with code
The itch hasn't gone away since.
03 / How I work

I believe in small surface areas, honest names, and the 10-minute rule: if you can't describe what you're building in under ten minutes, you don't understand it yet.

→ 01

Clarity over cleverness

The code I come back to in six months is the code that reads like English. Clever tricks age badly.

→ 02

Ship small, ship often

A tiny thing running in production beats a perfect thing still in a branch.

→ 03

Docs are a feature

If my future self can't onboard to it, neither can anyone else.

→ 04

Leave the campfire tidy

Tests, logs, comments where it matters. Future-you is a real person.

The dice giveth, the dice taketh away. Ship anyway.
— me, to myself, most Fridays

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