What I'm doing now

Updated on the 15th of May 2025

Back in October I left the contract I’d been at for 2.5 years to look after my baby son. Parental leave was very different this time around – very worthwhile, but being an unpaid contractor who needs to find something new at the end of the leave added a degree of stress that wasn’t there when I was an employee walking back into a role full of sympathetic people I already had a relationship with. Also, parental leave in summer absolutely trumps having it in winter!

Since going on leave I’ve been passively on the lookout for a new role, but that’s been a mildly depressing experience. Most jobs these days are advertised with a very strong AI slant, either a new role solely shipping AI features or for ensuring engineering is rolling it out. The focus really felt more on “enabling the machine” not “being great to humans”, which is frustrating when AI, for all its hype, is a tool rather than an outcome. I’m still looking (very carefully) for a long-term leadership role somewhere human-centric.

In the meantime, I reconnected with an old friend which led to a contracting role introducing formal information/cyber security and introducing infrastructure as code and some secure development practices. The people are great and there’s a lot to do. It also feels like a rare find to combine cyber security with infrastructure engineering (and a touch of dev).

Somehow I’ve managed to consistently make a little time to learn bass, found out a friend used to play guitar, and talked them into getting together to jam. I’ve (not deliberately) approached the bass totally differently to the guitar, learning full songs and working on the theory and basics before building up. I know it’s classic beginner advice to learn the whole song, but I never had the discipline with guitar.

This is a now page. If it’s old, hassle me on social media.