35063e

I’ve been breaking, rebuilding and generally interfering with technology for as long as I can remember.

It started with modifying games, messing around with consoles, taking computers apart and convincing myself I’d definitely remember where every screw went when it was time to put them back together.

Sometimes I even did.

At 16, I left my Computer Science studies and went straight into the industry, joining a small UK company designing and developing biometric security systems.

“Small company” probably undersells it a bit.

The team was small. The workload wasn’t.

Our systems ended up everywhere from government buildings and international banks to cash transportation, football stadiums and other places where “have you tried turning it off and on again?” wasn’t always an acceptable support response.

It was one of those jobs where your actual role depended entirely on what had caught fire that day.

One minute I’d be working on research and development, testing hardware or putting together schematics. The next I’d be repairing equipment, sourcing components, troubleshooting software, answering technical support calls or getting on a plane to Europe because something somewhere had decided it no longer wanted to work.

Basically: full-stack, if the stack included code, circuit boards, screwdrivers, biometric readers and airport security.

I spent eight years doing that.

And then I completely burned myself out.

The curiosity I’d always had for technology disappeared somewhere between support tickets, deadlines and repeatedly fixing things that definitely “just stopped working on their own.”

So I took a break.

Quite literally.

I swapped running code for running parcels to people’s front doors for a few months, before eventually moving into PropTech in a much less technical support role.

That was about five years ago.

For most of that time, I’ve done very little development outside of work. No side projects. No endlessly rebuilding things that already worked. No staying awake until 2am because I’d suddenly decided a button being three pixels out was completely unacceptable.

Then, recently, something changed.

I started building again.

And apparently I’d forgotten how addictive it is.

Technology has moved on quite a bit while I wasn’t paying attention. AI can now write code, GPUs cost roughly the same as a used car, everything has an API, half the internet runs on JavaScript packages maintained by somebody called Dave, and phones fold now for some reason.

For the first time in my life, I feel slightly behind technology.

Which is actually quite exciting.

There’s a lot to relearn, a lot of new stuff to experiment with, and probably an unreasonable number of things I’m going to build purely because I can.

That’s what 35063e is.

My little corner of the internet for development, experiments, tools, weird ideas and projects that started with:

“I wonder if I could…”

…and inevitably ended several hours later with 47 browser tabs open and something completely different running in production.

I’ll build things.

I’ll break things.

I’ll probably rebuild those things because the CSS annoyed me.

And I’ll document some of it here.

Welcome to the laboratory.