Product, Design, Engineering, Data Science. Marketing agencies, innovation studios, in-house. I’ve done all three, and moved between them on purpose.
I like the cutting edge, but the technology is often the easy part. People and process are the work.
My job is turning insight and intuition into decisions. Curious and creative first, rigorous second. Prototypes over decks. Experiments over opinions. I’ve killed ideas I liked because the data didn’t back them, and shipped ones I didn’t because it did.
Sometimes I lead from the front. Sometimes the best thing I can do is get out of the way. Either way, the work only gets good when people feel valued and safe enough to be wrong in front of each other. Self-esteem powers bravery.
I made an e-paper screen that tells me whether it’s worth a swim. It shows the sea temperature, the waves, the tide, the air, and whether any sewage outfalls nearby are spilling. Next to all that is a simple face. Happy, flat or sad. And a two-line phrase, like GET YOUR / COSSIE ON, written by one of the language models that make up Pan on my Mac mini.
It’s called Beach Face, a nod to the Resting Beach Face T-shirt from Harbour & Tide, my partner’s business.
Old experiments nobody asked for sit on the site, forgotten. Two of them just got asked for at once.
CLI Personality, four numbers I tuned by feel back in 2024. SAM, a browser replica of a 1982 text-to-speech program, built earlier this summer. Both turned up again while building my site’s self-hosted AI search assistant.
Also: a Random Walk toggle, and why a plain-text answer can have a temperament and a voice.