About me

I'm Will, a software engineer in Plymouth. I like owning a piece of software from end to end: the data model, the API, the interface people actually touch, and the server it runs on.

How I work

I studied Computer Science at the University of Plymouth and have been building software professionally since 2015: internal systems and DevOps at City College Plymouth, back-end work on Sky's network infrastructure tooling, and full-stack work on an insurance platform at Quotech. Go is my favourite language, and PostgreSQL is usually underneath whatever I'm building.

A lot of my career has been replacing systems that had outgrown themselves: a 15-year-old network inventory system at Sky, an account sync at the college that went from 25 minutes to 17 seconds, and a whole authorisation model at Quotech. That work taught me to care about the parts where mistakes are expensive, like permissions, money, and anything that could lose someone's data. I'd rather spend an afternoon making a failure impossible than a week cleaning up after it.

A few things I care about:

• Not losing people's work. Saves that survive crashes, conflicts that keep both copies, and recovery paths that are tested, not hoped for.
• Tests that catch real bugs. End-to-end journeys, invariant checks and visual baselines over coverage numbers.
• Plain language. In interfaces, error messages and documentation alike.

Outside work

Most of what's on this site started as something I wanted for myself.

• Writing. I'm writing a fantasy novel, and I builtRescriptus to write it in.
• Making games. Pioneer is the current one. I'm more interested in simulation and believable characters than in graphics.
• Running my own server. A small Linux box at home runs my projects in Docker behind Cloudflare Tunnels, with its own CI runners, monitoring, DNS filtering and backups.
• Modding and making things. I maintain a fixes mod for a Minecraft modpack, write mods for other games, and 3D print things around the house.

Say hello

The best way to reach me is email: [email protected]. You can also readmy CV.