15 years of shipping. Two small kids. One mission.

Between the CTO years and the PM role, I built a startup called Polkadot Tiger. I'd always been pulled more towards the decisions and the strategy than the code itself. As a developer I'd often find myself building things I didn't think made sense — but I didn't have the accountability, or really the role, to influence those calls.

Running my own thing meant I had to make those calls. I liked it. I was better at it than I'd guessed. So when it was time for the next move, I switched.

When I joined as CTO, the team were unhappy. Their personal time had been devalued for so long that estimates had ballooned — they were pre-emptively protecting their evenings, and there was a constant battle between what clients wanted and what the team wanted to do.

That was the first time I really understood how important it is to have the trust and the back of the team behind you. The biggest accomplishment was changing the culture. Pushing back on clients in reasonable ways. Asking for deadlines to move, or scope to be cut, so I could protect the team's evenings and weekends.

The team responded positively. Velocity went much higher, the team were happy, and the clients got more work shipped. Everyone won.

StillMind. It's a great end-to-end platform and it's genuinely mature: Sentry, Amplitude, a Mobile Measurement Partner tracking installs, a marketing site that's compounding traffic over time. The architecture is almost enterprise-level. I've built agentic systems for the ASO and the Apple Search Ads, and I've iterated the core product on real feedback and research.

I'm also personally proud of HabitCycles. It's a small project, but it's something deeply personal that I'd wanted to publish for years and always had blocks doing. I'm just glad I finally put it out there.

I was working as a remote developer and could be anywhere, so for a while I nomaded: hostels, new city every couple of weeks.

I was doing it wrong. I had to work full-time during the day, so the cycle was: relocate one weekend, work a week, explore the next weekend, relocate again. Two-week stints. Everyone else in the hostels was staying two or three days, so the people I'd just met were always gone by the weekend. I kept getting lonely.

I'd booked a flight home. I called my best friend, and he told me to get out of the hostels, into an Airbnb, and start going to expat events while I was still in Budapest waiting on the flight.

I did exactly that. The very next day I met friends I'm still friends with today. From that moment, I fell in love with Budapest as a city. The culture, the people, the weather, the activities. It became home.

Work-life balance matters to me, and I try to prioritise time with my kids. Remote work is a huge part of how that's possible. The time I'd otherwise spend commuting is time taken away from my family.

I love that when I finish work I can walk straight out of the office and be with my children. Those extra 30 to 60 minutes a day matter, because with normal working hours I only get a couple of hours with them anyway. If I had to commute, the lost time could be a third of the weekday I'd otherwise have with them.

That's insane to me.