What I have built, and the honest version of which parts of it were mine.
Three years there, 2023 to 2026. These are Concealed's projects rather than mine — I was one of the developers on them. On some I built most of it; on others I fixed things and moved on, and each card says which. Every one links to their own write-up, where the design work and the rest of the team are named.
A learning platform for a poker school. The content and the permissions both live in WordPress, so a manager decides who sees which lessons, podcasts and recorded streams without going near a developer. A student signs in, gets what their level opens, works down a collection with the progress kept, and argues about it in the comments underneath.
The site standing in front of the academy — coaching services laid out as a calendar, a page for each of the team, and the head coaches marked out with ace cards behind them. Every section of it, content included, is edited in WordPress, and the site redeploys from there without anyone having to call me.
A print shop that had run on paper and memory for forty-four years, given one linear production flow. Operators sign in with a PIN so every step is traceable, shipping is validated by QR code, and the floor gets a live board of what is where. Concealed puts it at two hours a day saved, and no errors since.
A storefront for flight-simulation add-ons, rebuilt to match the desktop app and the vendor platform either side of it.
A platform making Indigenous Australian history and culture accessible to people outside it. The shop came after the original build, and it is the part I worked on.
A cloud rendering platform for studios pushing 3D stills and animation through it, built in Framer.
Things I am building on my own time, from the first idea through to the thing itself. This slot fills up as they ship.
One call, a fixed-scope quote, and then we get to work.
Off duty · 01
It started as a favour to some friends, turned into a bet, and never quite stopped.
A couple of friends dragged me to a lesson at Cabedelo, in Figueira da Foz. The sea that day was unsurfable and I had the best time anyway. The school had thrown the first lesson in for free, which left me feeling enough of a freeloader to pay for a second one — and somewhere in that second lesson I decided I was perfectly capable of working the rest out on my own.
My friends bought a pack of lessons. I worked out that the same money bought a board, and that YouTube plus a generous quantity of failure would cover the rest. The disagreement became a bet: by the next summer we would go to Ericeira and settle which had got further, the lessons or the YouTube. The locals sent us to a beginner beach called Matadouro — slaughterhouse — and we spent the entire session too frightened of the rock bottom to prove anything to anyone. Cabedelo is sand. Nobody won.
Almost two years on, it is still the same group. They have all bought their own boards by now, which I am counting as a win whatever happened at Matadouro. One weekend the sea was too rough to be any fun and, instead of going home, we built Buy Greenland — a satirical site with a small merch shop attached. That is roughly the shape of it now: if the surf is off, something else gets made.
Off duty · 02
Three abandoned degrees, one cargo van, and far too many episodes of The Punisher.
I had dropped out of three courses by then — automotive engineering lasted two months, game and multimedia a year, data engineering a year and a half — and filled the gaps with unspecialised work, including a stretch driving goods around the country. I signed in 2020, wanting a different kind of difficulty. I had also watched a great deal of The Punisher, which I am not going to pretend was unrelated.
Basic training is three months. Covid interrupted mine, so it ran from 2020 into 2021 and took five. The graduation photograph from the first half is one of the few pictures I have of any of it.
Posted to the 14th Infantry Regiment in Viseu, where I stayed until 2022, and not long after arriving, out to Romania on the NATO Tailored Forward Presence mission — three months training with my platoon. Very little of it was dramatic. It was cold, repetitive, and done alongside people I would still trust with anything. It is where I learned to stay useful when the lights go out, and to carry a thing through its dull last stretch as carefully as its first. Neither has much to do with what I build now; both have everything to do with how I finish it.