Notes from the studio

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Born in Kent, 30 years old now, living in North Yorkshire. At seven I was diagnosed with a brain tumour. What followed was three major brain surgeries and a year of chemotherapy — treatment that worked, but left me permanently deaf in my left ear. I don’t remember most of it as dramatically as it probably sounds; it was just what childhood looked like for a while.

University didn’t stick, and I spent the years after that in and out of hospitality jobs — kitchens, bars, whatever paid. I also have ADHD, which took a long time to understand and even longer to stop fighting. Once I did, it turned out to be less of a problem and more of an operating manual — it’s a fair chunk of why I think in systems, why I get restless doing the same thing for too long, and why sitting behind a bar for another five years was never going to be the answer.

I started Horatio Digital Studio two years ago. In that time I’ve built an iOS app of my own from the ground up — ActionSmartAI, no longer live, but the thing that proved to me I could take an idea all the way to something real people used. That’s the short version of how a kid from Kent who spent a chunk of his childhood in hospital ended up building software for a living.

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I’ve been fascinated by technology since I was a kid — not just using it, but how it actually works. What makes one piece of software feel effortless and another feel like a fight. That curiosity never left, it just eventually found a job to do.

What genuinely excites me is the moment a business goes from stuck — a spreadsheet nobody fully trusts, a job that eats half a Tuesday every week — to having something that just works. Horatio exists because I wanted to point that lifelong obsession with software at something that actually helps people, rather than just being clever for its own sake.

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Every job starts the same way: working out what the problem actually is, not what it looks like at first glance. “We need a website” and “our workload is out of control” both sound like “we need software” — but they’re completely different problems, and they need completely different things built.

Jump straight to a solution before you’ve understood that, and you end up building the wrong thing very well — which is worse than not building anything. So before I write a line of code, I make sure I understand what’s actually broken, what it’s costing you, and what “fixed” would look like on an ordinary Tuesday. That’s what makes the end result relevant instead of just impressive.

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Away from the studio it’s rugby, cricket, and a golf swing I’m still trying to fix. The rest of the time goes to friends, family, and walking Minnie — my cocker spaniel, and the most dependable member of the team by some distance.

Long term, I’d like to be doing all of this from Barbados — running the studio from a laptop on a beach, delivering exactly the same work for exactly the same clients, just with better weather. Building something that doesn’t need me chained to a desk to keep working is, appropriately enough, exactly the kind of problem I like solving.