About Me
29 years of software engineering, security and applied AI.
I've been building software professionally since 1997, starting in Delphi and working through pharmacy systems, hosting infrastructure, telephony and school management platforms before landing at Textlocal, which became IMImobile, which became part of Cisco. Along the way I picked up an ADHD diagnosis as an adult that explained a lot: the deep-focus streaks, the pattern-spotting, the compulsion to fix clumsy systems. Once I understood it, it turned from a source of old problems into a genuine professional advantage.
I design and build things end to end: Blackwall, Alchementary Link, Fury and Leviathan are all mine, alongside the security, AWS infrastructure, observability and compliance work that pays the bills. I'm open to the next remote role that will keep this brain properly engaged: worldwide, remote only.
Portfolio
Flagship Work
Four products I designed and built, now sold and supported commercially through Alchementary. Each link below is the full engineering case study.
Identity & Access
Blackwall
WebAuthn-only OAuth 2.1 and OIDC server: PKCE, multi-tenant, audit logging, revocation, rate limiting.
Remote Access
Alchementary Link
Cross-platform SSH, Telnet and GitHub client with an encrypted vault, tabs and a command palette. Previously Nexus.
Cryptography
Fury
Post-quantum-only file encryption: hybrid FrodoKEM-640 plus ML-KEM-768, no classical fallback.
Forensics
Leviathan
Browser-based binary analysis and forensics workbench: twenty-plus tools, no upload, no telemetry.
Also worth a look
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A private spreadsheet-analysis workbench: anomaly detection, explainable scores, clean exports.
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VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, custom collectors and statistical analysis for teams that need more than a dashboard.
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A self-contained, OpenAI-compatible LLM server in a single Docker container: CPU or GPU, kept in-house.
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A process supervisor built for the times cron and systemd timers aren't quite enough.
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A database-free CMS for static sites that still need proper visual editing.
VS Code extensions: AndyDixon on the Marketplace
Services
What I Do
Software engineering and applied AI first, with security, infrastructure, observability and automation built in rather than bolted on.
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Software Engineering & Applied AI
PHP, Rust and Go systems built to last, plus practical AI work: from LLM tooling like Squish and Basilisk to exploring how AI can genuinely help people, not just demo well.
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Security, Risk & Compliance
Vulnerability assessment, root cause analysis and risk reduction, alongside ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 compliance work that actually holds up to audit.
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Infrastructure, Observability & Automation
AWS infrastructure, Prometheus and Grafana, Nagios Core, Docker, disaster recovery planning and the process automation that keeps all of it boring in the good way.
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Technical Escalation & Operations
The person other teams call when a problem crosses team or discipline boundaries: data analysis, cost optimisation and disaster response included.
Blog
A new, shiny technical article, every day.
Go and Rust internals taken apart with real code: why a worker pool deadlocks, what fsync actually promises, where context cancellation quietly does nothing. Linux and security how-tos you can follow line by line: LUKS2 with a detached header, WireGuard between two sites, nftables, SSH certificates, TPM-backed unlocking. UK privacy law read from the legislation itself rather than the press release.
● Available for work
Open to remote roles worldwide.
Looking for the next substantial technical challenge: something that keeps an ADHD brain properly engaged. Remote only, anywhere in the world.
Career
Textlocal → IMImobile → Cisco
Fourteen years and one acquisition trail, plus everything before it.