Dave fromReadingFive things, off the clock
Interests
- A spreadsheet of every flight I have taken
- Aircraft type, airport, date. No operational purpose whatsoever — I simply like tracking it, the way some people keep records of goals scored. It ran to hundreds of rows and became the reason I learned enough to replace it with something real. That turned into an app: a VPS, a 3D-model service for the aircraft, an API, and a Telegram bot so I could add rows from my phone while doing something else. Forty-five dollars, all in, most of one weekend. The interesting part was never the spreadsheet; it was that having a concrete object to maintain turned out to be the best teacher I have found for a new tool.
- Football
- I am a devoted Reading FC fan; they play in England’s League One. I follow England for internationals, and given the chance I will watch almost any professional game. I am also an occasional guest on the Elm Park Royals podcast ↗.
- AI tooling, at weekends
- Mostly building things nobody asked for and then writing down what surprised me. I keep a low tolerance for hype and a high tolerance for trying the thing out myself — the gap between what a model is claimed to do and what it actually does on your codebase is the only measurement I trust. The useful question is rarely whether a model can produce something; it is whether the result survives review. A surprising share of my writing starts as a note to myself.
- Places with runways
- An airport is one of the few pieces of infrastructure designed so that a stranger can understand it entirely at a glance, from a moving vehicle, in any weather. Signage, sequencing, the decision to put the information exactly where someone will need it and no further. It is a better brief than most software I have shipped, and I have never once seen it specified in a requirements document.
- Physical AI
- Genuinely hard problems in the physical world — material flow, orchestration, the gap between what a robot arm can do and what the business needs on Thursday. This has been the day job for four years, and it is still the newest territory I have worked in, which is partly why it holds my attention: coming from SaaS, I keep finding the software problems are downstream of the physical ones.
Why this page exists
Because a person who only publishes about the parts of their job that go into a job description is not telling you very much. The flight spreadsheet and the football say something real about how I work — the first is a maintenance story, the second is a patience story, and both have taught me more than another certification would have.
The writing on the other pages of this site started as notes to myself, for the same reason.