I’m a technology expert working at QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey in London.
My journey started with C and C++, writing device drivers, then moved through .NET and a little F#, into JavaScript and Node.js/TypeScript, with Python along the way. Plenty of bash, spit and glue, vim and tmux. For most of my time at McKinsey and QuantumBlack I have been building cloud-native distributed systems, mainly for financial institutions. Nowadays it’s a tonne of AI.
Selected Publications
- Effective Shell – No Starch Press, 2025
- Seizing the agentic AI advantage – McKinsey & Company, 2025
- Agentic AI: Moving beyond pilots to enterprise impact – McKinsey & Company, 2025
Selected Projects
- Hacker Laws – Laws, theories, principles and patterns for developers
- Effective Shell – Text and samples for my Effective Shell book
- terminal-ai – Unopinionated AI for the Shell. A lightweight AI CLI for scripts, pipelines, and automation, with a universal client for MCP, A2A, and other AI protocols.
- dotfiles – My personal setup: Vim, Tmux, Shells
- claude-toolkit – Claude Code plugins toolkit for various engineering tasks
- claude-code-agent – Run Claude Code as an isolated and containerized A2A agent
- SharpShell – Create Windows Shell Extensions using .NET
- SharpGL – Use OpenGL in .NET applications
Conference Presentations
- The Changelog: Laws for hackers to live by – Podcast, 2020
- VoxxedDays Singapore: What does DevOps culture mean for engineers? – 2018
- DevOpsDays Jakarta: The Universe as Code – 2018
- Serverless Summit: Build a chatbot in ten minutes – 2017
- DevOpsDays Singapore: Microservices to Monoliths – 2017
- JSChannel: Effective Node Debugging – 2016
Education
- Degree in Natural Sciences (Chemistry, Physics & Mathematics) – University of Cambridge.
- I did a tonne of Microsoft certifications years ago, some MongoDB stuff and others.