Updated December 2025

I'm currently focussed on:

• Spending time with family.
• Trying to regain my fitness with strength training, and finding ways to work general exercise into my day. Unfortunately, diet and fitness programme fell apart at the end of 2024, and getting on track 2025 didn't gone to plan to start with. Since October 2025, I've been accurately tracking calorie intake and working on a ~500kcal per day deficit.
• Continuing to practice mindfulness using Calm, even if just for 1 minute a day. I can't fall asleep without one of Calm's Sleep Stories in the background (usually one of the stories narrated by Alan Sklar).
• Writing some articles again to get this blog back up and running and publishing to my email list. I've found myself posting more moments recently, rather than posting to social media.
• Talking of which, reducing and removing social media (no phone apps). I tend to use Bluesky for sharing occasional thoughts.
• Slowly learning to play the piano.
• Adopting a Mediterranean-style diet, with a focus on reducing/removing processed products and sugars. I currently use Fitbit to track health stats, and Lifesum for food tracking (it has rapid data entry, and the database of UK foods is the most complete I've found). Lifesum introduced AI scanning earlier, but the UX wasn't great. In recent updates, they've really improved it and I'm finding it really helpful for quickly and accurately tracking food intake.
• Organising myself with Bullet Journaling, both on paper and Obsidian. I current track tasks with Todoist. Whilst nothing beats its natural-date entry, and infinite reminder options, I would like to find an open source / open data alternative.
• Figuring out what to for the next 5 years in business. Plymouth Software turned 15 years old in 2025.
• I've spent a lot of time recently using data tooling on AWS (Glue, Athena, Data Pipelines, custom-ETL etc.), and am introducing what I've learned into new data engineering services at Plymouth Software.
• Adopting subscription pricing options to complement the value pricing of my consulting and business services.
• Updating Keep Your Rails App Healthy and Rails on Docker, and new products to complement the business.
• Drinking far too much just enough 🫖 tea and ☕️ coffee.

Apps and Tools

I've moved this to the App Defaults page

Business Enquiries

See plymouthsoftware.com for details of my professional development and consulting services.

Help with your code

I genuinely enjoy helping and teaching other developers, and regularly receive questions for help with coding. To help me manage these requests as they increase in volume:

If you have a small development query, such as help with a particular piece of code, please post it on StackOverflow, and send me the link.

In this way, the whole community can benefit from - and contribute to - our learning.

For direct, one-on-one support for your code, or to discuss a larger project, I offer professional software consulting services through my business.

Why?

These are my priorities right now. With the exception of the above, I say no to everything else, including:

• recruitment/employment offers;
• business partnerships;
• equity/profit–share deals;
• marketing services;
• outsourcing my development work;
• stuff being sold over the phone;
• …and so on.

Saying "no" does not come naturally to me, but taking this approach helps me to keep focussed on priorities.

Inspired by zen habits and Derek Sivers.