Blog
What Happens When You Let AI Think Before It Speaks?
Part 1 of a series on Claude API features for builders We’re all inundated with AI-related content these days, but for me I seem to see more AI=bad than anything else online. It’s all jailbreak-this, benchmark-fail-that, incoming apocalypse, and risk risk risk! But some of it will be good. So I’m planning to write some AI=good content, and hopefully give some of you good reasons to explore bringing AI technologies into what you’re building. I’ve been working with the Anthropic Claude APIs a lot lately, so I’m going to focus on some of its features that I think are genuinely useful, interesting, and worth understanding properly.
March 16, 2026
We Need to Build
Give me a 100 million dollars, 20 smart and well-paid people, access to GPUs and cloud resources, and twelve months. I’d give it a 50% chance of being a worthwhile investment, but it could be the Snowy Hydro of the 21st century for Australia. I’ve watched the discourse about AI in Australia for a while now, the hand-wringing about being “left behind,” the earnest policy papers, the endless conferences. And I keep arriving at the same conclusion: this isn’t an AI problem. It’s a risk problem. We’ve lost the appetite for doing big things for the benefit of the nation.
February 25, 2026
On Finding Your Tenets
I’ve been reading Dan Koe lately. If you haven’t come across him, he writes about building a life around ideas, writing, creating, thinking for a living. One concept of his caught me off guard: the idea that articulate people aren’t pulling insights out of thin air. They have maybe 8-10 “greatest hits” that they’ve refined through repetition, ideas they can connect to almost any topic because they’ve thought through them hundreds of times.
December 16, 2025
Securing Firebase Cloud Functions with Workload Identity Federation
If you’re building a mobile app with Firebase and want to protect Cloud Functions that call paid APIs - AI services, databases, or external integrations - you need to understand a critical security gap: Firebase Auth validation happens inside your function, after it’s already running and billing you. This means every request to your function is billable, even if the token is invalid. Malicious actors can spam your endpoints with garbage tokens and drain your budget. Your Firebase Auth validation will reject them, sure - but not before GCP bills you for each function invocation.
November 27, 2025
On Building vs Joining
I’ve been going down the startup path over the last 12 months, a very different life to the decades I spent in big tech companies. Someone recently asked me which was “better”, joining an established company or building your own thing. It made me laugh a little, not because it’s silly, but because I’ve spent the better part of 25 years convinced I knew the answer, only to completely reverse my position… twice.
November 20, 2025
On Legacy
On my last day at AWS, after 8 and a half years, I posted one final message to my team. It was that meme from The Usual Suspects, you know the one, with the caption “and like that, he’s gone.” Then I removed myself from the Slack channel and shut down my laptop. I’d left companies before. Twice from Microsoft, and both times I’d felt that surge of panic, the “oh shit, what have I just done?” moment. But this time, closing that laptop after nearly nine years, I felt… relief. I was ready. I was tired. And more importantly, I was moving on to build something that mattered to me in a different way.
November 15, 2025
On Change
“Everything changes all the time.” I heard this phrase so many times at AWS that it became almost like a mantra. I can’t remember which manager said it first, or even if it was always the same person saying it, but I heard it over and over. In a company moving at AWS’s pace, where new services launched every week and teams reorganized every quarter, it wasn’t profound wisdom so much as observed reality. The thing about hearing something repeatedly in that environment is that eventually you stop noticing you’re saying it yourself.
October 29, 2025
On Long-term Thinking
There’s a concept in evolutionary biology called the “adjacent possible”, it’s about exploring what’s reachable from where you are now, the space of possibilities that opens up with each step forward. Stuart Kauffman used it to describe how biological systems evolve, but I’ve come to see it as the perfect metaphor for navigating careers in our accelerating world. Hence why I named my company Adjacent Possible Tech. The irony of writing about long-term thinking in 2025 is that the very concept feels like it’s undergoing time dilation. We used to plan infrastructure projects with 5+ year burn-down periods. Systems were built with 10+ year lifecycles. Now? Even outside the AI frenzy, the tech industry moves so fast that what we used to call “long-term” is barely medium-term. It’s like we’re living in a temporal compression chamber where the future arrives before we’ve finished planning for it.
October 22, 2025
On Imposter Syndrome
This is going to be a hard one. Imposter syndrome is something I’ve wrestled with my entire career, and I suspect many of you have too. After 25 years in tech, multiple career transitions, and countless “oh shit” moments, I’ve come to realize something counterintuitive: imposter syndrome might actually be a feature, not a bug. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start by unpacking what this beast actually is, where it comes from, and why it’s simultaneously the thing that’s held me back and pushed me forward throughout my career.
October 1, 2025
On Theories, Laws and Effects
When I started at AWS in 2016, I didn’t know it at the time but I was about to start learning about various theories, laws and effects. My manager, Simon, introduced me to the first one that caught my attention (for purely technical reasons), but soon after I started taking more and more notice of these seemingly universal and well-accepted statements about situations and behaviours. Now I’ve had time to absorb them and see how they apply in the real world, I wanted to call out some of my favourites and talk about my experiences with them. Overall, I don’t think you can pigeonhole any one person or situation with these, but by leveraging them as a collection of mental models you can start to understand the reasons behind someone’s thoughts or actions, even your own.
September 16, 2025