Comfortable in My Awkwardness

No one was interested in what I had to say.

The vacant expressions of “I’d rather be somewhere else” were clear.

The polite smiles and the clapping at the end of my technical presentation just rubbed it in.

This was during my first job out of university at an IT consultancy. I had to deliver a short overview of what I was working on to a small group of colleagues.

The nerves were there but everyone says they get them so that was normal. I turned and said to my manager, “I think I’m going to make a complete hash of this”.

He replied in his apathetic voice; “Just be yourself. You’ll be fine.”

I stand up and walk to the front of the meeting room thinking to myself – “Just be yourself”.

I looked at my notes and read off the projected slides, my back towards the audience so that I didn’t have to make eye contact. The words came out fast but comfortable enough for me.

I quietly explained the overly complex diagram and finished with how this would help the project.

“Any questions?”

There were none.

Great - it was short and sweet and I went back to my seat faster than a cheetah in a white collar.

The reason I’m telling you this is because being myself was not enough.

The truth is most people are not invested in your future. They give you what you want to hear and take the route that is easiest for them.

“Just be yourself” was the cop-out advice my manager gave me.

I Wish I’d Known This Sooner

I was that nerdy tech guy for a long time - for decades. I always thought my work would speak for itself and that would be enough. My technical expertise would shine and I would be recognised through it.

But the truth is you get noticed by how you communicate.

I recently started working with a voice coach to boost my presentation skills. I wish I’d known about such things sooner. The perspective you get from someone who is an expert in what they do and is genuinely interested in seeing me improve.

He’s taught me that communicating is like living in a city. Some parts I was familiar with and regularly visited while other parts less so.

But that does not mean I shouldn’t explore the variety and range of my voice.

And he showed me that talking with more energy and passion was not fake as some people would say.

“It’s not you. That’s just so fake. Just be yourself”.

Trying different ways of talking is not fake, it’s was just exploring the city I live in. Getting to know those areas I’m not so familiar with, those areas I'm not so comfortable with.

So next time you want to talk in front of a crowd don’t think “fake it till I make it” but instead “this is my city and I’m going to explore”.

There’s so much to learn in tech that it can bamboozle a sane minded person and can feel overwhelming a lot of time. But just knowing what is possible is a huge leg up and opens many doors.

If you would like to receive my tech tips and insights, join the hundreds of other smart people who absolutely love it today.

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Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

TLDR;

Stay curious.

Keep learning.

There’s so much out there that we all just don’t know about.

Earning a Super Power

How many times have you said; “I never knew that was possible. That’s amazing!” after being told a new trick or life hack?

This is the exact response I gave when I learnt about “regular expressions” over 20 years ago and I’m still amazed by it today.

It’s like a super power.

Regular expressions, more commonly known as regex, is a way of searching for text using a special syntax.

Now you might think that searching for text in a document is a trivial task which everyone knows how to do. On the whole you’d be correct but you’ve only ever been taught how to search a body of text in one way.

If no one has ever shown you how to search in another way then of course you’d be oblivious to other methods.

With regex you move away from searching for exact text to matching for a particular pattern in the text. This is the mindset shift that I’m going to show you today.

Regex in action

Let’s say you had a huge legal document, 900 pages in length. You want to change all the occurrences of the main witnesses name to something else. How would you do it?

The simplest way is to search for “THE NAME” and replace with “REDACTED”. Nothing mind blowing about that, right. “Where is this going?”, I can hear you say.

Let’s take the same huge document and remove all the email addresses from it. What do you do now? Not so straight forward is it?

You could search for all the occurrences of the “@” symbol and then manually change it to “REDACTED” but that could take hours depending on the number of times that symbol appears in the document.

It’s problems like this that the mind of a programmer, like myself, like to solve. Let me take you through that process.

What do you know about emails addresses?

Well, they usually start with letters or numbers and sometimes have punctuation like - . _ to list a few.

Then there’s always an “@” symbol.

This is followed by more letters, numbers and sometimes dashes but never underscores.

Finally there’s the . (dot) and some more letters which is always two or more but never numbers.

We have a pattern we can use to recognise a valid email address just by looking at it.

So can a computer do that?

Well, yes of course it can. In fact searching for text patterns in programming is so common that Stephen Kleene created a language to do just that back in the 1950s. That language is still used today.

[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}

That’s not a typo above. This is the regex pattern that you can use to search for a valid email address. It’s similar to what a website would use to check if the email field is filled in correctly.

I’ll give some details in to what it all means but once you understand it, it makes sense and feels like a secret that only you and a handful of others share.

Let me break it down in to 5 parts.

[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+ : This first bit covers the range of letters, numbers and punctuation that are valid. The [ ] bit defines this as a list. The + at the end means one or more of these characters are needed to match the pattern. So this will match “az-987” but not “#”

Then there is an actual “@” symbol.

[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+ : This is followed by another range of letters, numbers and punctuation. Notice the list of valid punctuation is only . and - now. Do you remember what the + at the end means?

\. : Then there is an actual dot character. The dot by itself means something different to \. but that’s beyond what I want to cover here.

[a-zA-Z]{2,} : Finally there’s another [ ] list of valid characters. Notice there’s no numbers in the list. This time there must be 2 or more of these letters at the end.

So now you know. You’re a regex pro, well at least on your way there.

Can you think of other examples where you’d need to search for a pattern rather than an exact word?

What about searching for all occurrences of the $ symbol and ensuring that the number contains 2 decimal places.

I’ve give you a glimpse of how it’s possible to search for a pattern but not how to replace it with a pattern. That will have to be for another day. Comment below if you’d like me to take you through it.

I need more

Well, what do you say? I’m guessing it’s something similar to what I said 20 odd years ago.

“I never knew that was possible. That’s amazing!”

There’s so much to learn in tech that it can bamboozle a sane minded person and can feel overwhelming a lot of time. But just knowing what is possible is a huge leg up and opens many doors.

If you would also like to receive my tech tips and insights through this newsletter, join the hundreds of other smart people who absolutely love it today.

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In this recording of a live web class I go over:

• why you’d want a Substack custom domain

• how long it takes to setup

• how much it costs to setup

• how your browser talks to Substack using a domain name

• how to buy a domain name

• how to setup Substack to accept a custom domain name

• how to create a DNS record to point to your Substack newsletter

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Imagine this: your business, your brand, your profile suddenly inaccessible to everyone who has ever seen, read or heard any of your amazing content.

Are you well known enough that your audience would say: “Hey, I really miss so and so’s articles or I wish I could watch that person’s videos”.

Or would you be forgotten and lost amongst all the other creators out there?

And what about all that content you released for free on rented platforms? Has that disappeared with your following?

This is what happened to hundreds and thousands of creators on the TikTok platform in the USA on Sunday, January 19th, 2025 due to a ban imposed by the Biden administration.

Those creators had lost the audience they had built up.

They had lost all their content.

They were filled with dread.

Everything gone.

It was like something that you might hear on a magic show.

Now you see it …

and now you don’t.

Fortunately for those creators, TikTok was back online after President Trump extended the enforcement deadline for the ban.

Your personal vault

I have encountered the topic of keeping backups many times in my career and I want to drive home this point today.

It’s not sexy nor does it spark delight and if you have it set up, most of the time it just happens in the background and is forgotten about.

In most corporate firms keeping backups is drilled into all tech solutions. I've had a few moments in my past when having access to a backup was a life saver.

I recall a time when I was on-call for a telecoms company. At 3am, I received an automated robotic voice call from the monitoring service.

“Pagerduty Alert. You have one trigger incident on Insurance Service. The failure is server 5 down. Press 4 to acknowledge. Press 3 to resolve ...”. I press 4 without listening to the full list of options.

Anyone who has worked in retail will know that selling insurance policies as an add-on to a product sale is a giant money-maker for a business. So, for part of the core insurance system to be down 5 hours before the next business day, was a big deal.

Climbing out of bed, bleary-eyed, dazed and working alone in the dead of the night I logged in to the IT systems with my laptop. I did the minimum amount of work required to get a service back online. A system reboot.

But that didn’t work.

This occurred in the days when we didn’t have the luxuries of working in modern cloud platforms, where I can rebuild a server with little effort in a matter of minutes.

I had to restore the failed server from a backup. Fortunately, this company took their backups serious taking them daily. I was able to restore the service by 6am before the beginning of the working day. There was enough time remaining to catch up on some much needed sleep.

Why rent when you can own

How many small and medium-sized businesses actually take backups seriously?

You see you don’t directly control the data and content you put on these rented platforms. By rented platforms, I mean TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X (Twitter), Medium, Substack, to name a few. Your valuable content lives on a platform that is owned by someone else and the plug can be pulled on them at any moment, as we saw with TikTok last week.

We all need to own our data and be fearless if or when a platform dies. We need to be able to have access to our videos, podcasts, images and articles without being at the mercy of the troubles at social media companies.

Single points of failure in your business need to be addressed and backups are part of the way to solving this problem.

We need backups of our data because it’s ours.

A path to worry-free

I’m guilty as the next person. Some of my data is backed up while other files just sit on my phone or laptop.

But, a small step toward your information security is still a step in the right direction. So don’t dispair.

Select the data that would be most valuable to you if you lost it.

And start putting it in a safe place today.

Credits:
Music: Sleepless City by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon
Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Can I Be Bother?

Recording and editing audio can take a hell of a lot of time. But is it worth the effort?

Does your post get boosted if you add audio?

Does it attract a following and subscribers?

With the popularity of Amazon Audible are more people moving towards listening rather than reading?

Back in September, I spent over 4 hours recording and editing the audio for a Substack article about a friend whose online accounts got hacked. You can listen to the audio here.

While I’m proud of what I achieved with my novice Audacity skills, was spending that much time on the audio really worthwhile?

What Do Readers Really Want?

I reached out to my modest following on X, Substack and a writer’s slack group of which I’m a member and asked the simple question; “Do you listen to the audio in articles published online?”

I got some interesting answers and unusual reasons. Here are some of the replies I got back:

Read. But then I'm a fast reader. If it's audio, it makes it easier for my mind to wander.

Depends where I am. Usually read, but if I'm on the go, audio is easier.

I prefer to read. I soak in the language more when I read it rather than listen.

Reading too, here. It is easier to fully immerse myself. And it's easier to scroll up and down instead of stopping and looking for the right time.

Reading allows me to really focus.

So there were a group of readers who clearly preferred reading over listening as this helped them focus and absorb the content as well as navigate around the article if they wanted to skip ahead.

The other thing that came to light during this survey was the way people interacted with Substack - more than half only read the email and did not click through to the app or website to listen to the author’s recording. This alone is swaying the effort needle to the lower end of the scale.

But then there were the auditory cheerleaders. Here’s what they commented:

Depends. It becomes a habit to listen to a podcast from one person and read work from another. Also if I don’t like their voice, I won’t listen.

Listening to voiceovers enriches the post for me as it’s another way to build a connection with the author by hearing them speak.

After a while, sometimes I can hear their voice when I read their content (notes or posts).

Hey Abid, audio makes your article accessible. Not only in our rushed society or Podcast sense but for folks with disabilities. Or like me - my concussion brain can't read reams of text anymore.

I would only listen to the audio if I'm curious about the person's voice, or want to hear their voice, for some reason.

I always make an audio because it adds value, people can listen in the car and when doing housework, plus we get into habits about how we consume different creator's content.

These people are looking to build a connection with the writer not only through reading but also listening and after some time some people mentioned they could hear the writer’s voice in their head while reading their work.

Also, Janet made a strong point that it makes my article more accessible to folks with disabilities which is so often overlooked.

The Verdict

Over 80% of the people who took the survey said they preferred to read articles and rarely listened to the audio associated with the text. Were these results skewed because of the writer’s cohort that I’m a part of? Do they spend more time on Substack than the average reader and do they read more to consume content for their own writing?

I’ll have to re-run this survey when I have a larger and more diverse following but until then; I’m going to continue recording audio for my articles so that I can accommodate the 20% who like to listen.

Next step is to find a way to streamline the audio recording and editing process.

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Credits:
Music: Somewhere in the Clouds by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon
Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Do you have ANY idea how many online accounts you have and how many passwords? I checked all my password managers and the total was over 500!

Accounts for banks, utility companies - old and new, both business and personal social media, schools, online retailers, streaming services, logins for customer sites, government and local authority accounts. This is password hell.

How did it ever get like this?

In the early days of the internet back in the 1990s no one envisaged that this would happen. You had one password for your email and the rest of the internet was just for public information.

And when I refer to email in the 1990s it wasn’t the fancy graphical, colourful browser-based email. It was a server that you logged into using one of those text-only green screens.

In my last post, I told you the story of Sara, a friend who got hacked a few years ago. Have a read and listen to the audio when you have time.

Hackers are trawling the internet for personal and private data all day long. Family members, dates of birth, names of pets, education and employment history, credit card data and of course passwords. They are building up profiles of anyone and everyone of any age from any country of any gender, faith or skin colour.

Everyone is a target.

Why Passwords Are A Bad Idea

We all know that using passwords as the gatekeeper of our personal and private information just doesn’t feel safe enough or at least I do.

How many people use the names of family members and memorable dates as their passwords? A hell of a lot of people I imagine; hackers and criminals know this and are scraping your social media post to find any clues.

Why are people so careless with their passwords? Usually, it’s because remembering passwords is hard. To add to that try remembering 500 different passwords. Impossible for the average mere mortal.

This leads to our second problem - password reuse. When you have so many passwords to remember you start reusing them across different services. This is a recipe for disaster. I’ll explain why another time.

So now we are faced with the classic security dilemma. A service needs to be easy enough for users to log in or access their accounts. However, at the same time you need to make sure that no one else can break in.

There Has To Be A Better Way

And there is - phew. But it will need some re-education. We need to use a multi-layered approach to securing online accounts. Passwords alone can be weak, follow predictable patterns or be susceptible to phishing attacks.

Here are 5 ways to improve your online security:

1 - Password Manager

This tool allows you to generate complex passwords and store them for you. Most browsers already have this feature. It means you only need to memorise one complex password to unlock the password manager. It can generate complex credentials for all your other accounts and ensure all passwords are different. This significantly reduces the chance of using weak passwords or password reuse.

This is my top recommendation that you can start using today.

2 - Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Confusingly, this method goes by different names; some online services call it two factor authentication (2FA) while yet others call it two step verification (2SV).

However, they all mean the same thing. You have a physical device or app that generates a 6-digit code that changes every minute. It could also be random letters or a code that is emailed to you. This is an additional step you need to do after your password.

The key feature being that if your password is stolen then your account is still secure because three bits of information are needed to login. Your email which you know, your password which you memorise or store in a password manager and a 6-digit code which is generated on a device you have. Without all three pieces, logins will not be possible.

There are downsides to MFA such as if you lose your MFA device (usually an app on your phone) then you can’t login and have to follow an unfamiliar recovery process which can be lengthy.

Also, the feature needs to be enabled by the service you are using. All the major companies will do this already but not everyone.

3 - Biometric Authentication

Most modern mobile phones will have a fingerprint scanner. This has proved to be an amazing alternative to using passwords. Your biometrics are unique to you and are very difficult to replicate.

Again, like MFA the various apps and online services need to have this feature enabled.

4 - Passwordless Authentication

Yet another excellent method is passwordless logins. This is where a code is sent to you by email or push notification to your phone. You can then use the code or prompt to allow you access to your online account.

Again, like MFA and biometric logins the online services need to have this feature turned on for you to be able to make use of it.

5 - Security Keys

These are physical hardware-based keys (like YubiKey) that provide one of the most secure methods for account protection. They can’t be compromised remotely or by phishing.

Key Takeaways

Passwords are still a common way of securing online accounts but their effectiveness is becoming inadequate. We need to re-educate ourselves in other methods to secure our online accounts and there are many ways available. We just need to take the first step to change the way we login.

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Credits:
Music: Downpour by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon
Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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This is the story of Sara (not her real name to protect her identity). A 21 year-old university student who loved staying connected with friends and family through social media.

She had a simple password; the name of her younger sister and her year of birth but she was not concerned. After all, who would possibly want to target a regular person like her? As a student, she didn't have any money and wasn't a celebrity or well-known in any way.

One morning after waking up she grabbed her phone to check Instagram. She was logged out. Attempts to login were greeted with big bold red letters; "Sorry, your password was incorrect". She thought nothing of it, maybe some food would clear up her hazy head and blurry eyes.

After breakfast she left her small shared flat for her first university lecture, closing the front door quietly to not wake anyone else. The raining was pouring down when she eventually got onto the bus. Looking at her phone during the journey she saw that Twitter and TikTok were also inaccessible. A similar message, "Wrong password".

She restarts her phone thinking that switching it off and on again may fix something but it didn't. Gmail was logged out too as well as the university learning portal. She was confused and frustrated.

What was going on?

She went back to Instagram and clicked the "Forgotten your password?" option but was asked to "Enter your email address" which she couldn't access.

Returning to Gmail she tried the "Forgot password?" button. Sara was taken to the "Account recovery" page. A pop-up asked; "Do you have your phone?" She held back the tears as the emotions raced through every blood vessel as she remembered her dad showing her how to set up a recovery phone number. A thin, glimmer of hope.

We'll return to Sara's story later. Let's look at how all her accounts could have gotten hacked.

Hackers are trawling the internet for personal and private data all day long. Family members, dates of birth, names of pets, education and employment history, credit card data and of course passwords. They are building up profiles of anyone and everyone of any age from any country of any gender, faith or skin colour.

Everyone is a target.

Sometimes these harvested passwords are published on the internet for all to see. By whom? It may surprise you. Hackers? Criminals? Yes of course. But also by government agencies.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in the UK is a government agency setup to make, "the UK a safer place to live and work online". As part of their education remit they have published the top 100,000 most commonly used leaked passwords. Make sure your password isn't on that public page. You can find the list here.

In Sara's case, the password could have been a common one found on a public list. But I also learnt that her password was weak and derivable from the birthdays and names she'd publicly posted on social media. Link this with common password patterns known to hackers.

Common password patterns such as:

• starting with a capital letter

• name of a family member, pet or nickname

• name of tv show/movie or tv show/movie character

• name of a video game or video game character

• name of a music artist

• swear words or body parts

• a colour (red is the most common)

• countries or cities

• fashion, makeup or car brands

• name of your favourite sport or sports team

• end in 2 or 4 digits usually a birth date or anniversary

• only lowercase letters 6-10 characters long

• only 6-8 digitals long

• end with an exclamation mark (!)

If you use any of the patterns combinations above you may be leaving yourself open to hackers by reducing the number of combinations they need to try to access your account.

The number of publicly available hacked passwords matching the pattern first letter capital and 8 letters long is over 4.5 million.

Let's catch up on Sara's progress. She requests a recovery code to be delivered to her phone and waited. Minutes passed but it felt like hours. The noise of the street was muted, replaced by the pulsing beat of anticipation.

Nothing.

A WhatsApp notification pinged. Oh my god. WhatsApp was still working. She let out a gasp and saw 25 unread chats from various people. 10 messages from her mum.

"Are you in trouble darling?"

"I got your email"

"If you need money so urgently you should have just called me"

"I've transferred the outstanding £300 to your landlord's accounts"

At first, the messages didn't make any sense but then it dawned on her. All her accounts had been hacked and someone was now impersonating her.

Her mum, along with other email contacts, had received requests for financial help. Although Sara's mum was the only one who sent money without questioning it.

Sara was now shaking, in tears, quietly sobbing and sniffing, makeup ruined. The man sitting next to her on the bus glanced over and quickly back to his Candy Crush game. He made it clear he wanted no part in whatever was going on.

She was in no state to talk to her mum. A WhatsApp message was sent to her best friend asking her to meet her at the university bus stop.

A phone call from a private number broke the sinner mood. Suspiciously she answered. It was her bank querying a password reset. Through sobbing, she explained her email had been hacked and the bank took the appropriate action; locked her account and cancelled all her cards. She only had enough pocket change for lunch but it would be almost 2 weeks before her financial access would be restored.

When she arrived at university her friend was waiting. They just held each other and said nothing while Sara continued crying.

We all lead lives that are heavily dependent on passwords. However, most people are oblivious to the risks they put themselves in.

Sara’s story serves as a reminder that anyone, no matter how ordinary, can become a target for hackers. All it takes is one weak password to wreak havoc on your digital life. Next week I'll take you through how internet security has improved and what you can do to give yourself the best protection.

Sara eventually got her Gmail account back after more than a week and access to the university learning portal but not her other social media accounts.

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Credits:
Intro music: It’s In The Fog by Darren Curtis | https://www.darrencurtismusic.com
Main theme: Abandoned by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon
Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

I’m sitting in my comfortable coding cocoon writing this article using the Visual Studio Code editor rather than a regular document editor.

I don't know how to write articles but I do know how to write code. The syntax flows freely from my fingers and the outcome gives me joy. But can I master this alien world of sentences and paragraphs?

Strange; that's how I feel knowing that I talk using English words every day but writing words down takes forever to word and re-word and edit and re-edit. Should I write like I talk or do I put on a performance like scripting a theatrical play? Do I just say whatever I like hoping it will resonate with people or craft each line to pack a punch worthy of the Turner Prize?

As a novice trying to write online is an overwhelming task and I imagine it's like a beginner learning to code; the syntax, the structure, the symbols and spacing. When to combine code and when to split across lines. How to start and how to end.

if (i_can_code);
then
  i_can_write = true;
fi

What I know from coding is that software development is incredibly complex. Software engineers often don't know how to solve the colossal problems they are presented with and so they follow these five principles to figure it out. The overarching theme is to “optimise for learning”.

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1. Iterate

This principle is about getting stuff out fast in small steps, by using some sort of workflow, a series of repeatable steps that you follow each time. Think of it like publishing a book but just one page at a time. The more stuff you get out, the more you learn about how it works in the wild and whether it takes you towards or away from your end goal. Imagine how a novel could twist and change direction based on the learnings from releasing a chapter at a time.

You also learn all the repetitive parts that can be streamlined for faster delivery and potentially automate the boring bits away.

I'm hoping to write short posts on social media every day and one long post a week. Right now I'm optimising for learning to see what works.

2. Increment

It's not just about getting stuff out there randomly and hap-hazzardly. Change needs to be incremental; better each time. For that, you need to measure how each piece of writing is doing. If it can be measured it can be improved. Don't be disheartened by poor engagement. It's like a game, each time you get a little further and it feels good.

I'm hoping to evolve my writing about using tech to build my business but if that doesn't fly then I'll incrementally change direction until I find what works.

3. Experiment

This can seem scary when writing but in software engineering, it's a perfectly normal thing. You're not sure what will resonate so you try stuff out. Sometimes that takes the form of A/B testing where some audiences will see one variation and another will see something else. Other times it can be just trying a few different ideas to see what resonates.

With writing it can seem like a waste of time, meandering with ideas but in engineering this way of learning is really fun. It’s like experimenting with anything in life; cooking, movie genres, outdoor activities; you learn more about yourself and the people around you. I intend to have fun with my writing.

4. Empirical

In other words, stop overthinking it by delving into theories and strategies, quick hacks and endless tutorials and podcasts. Learn by doing. It won't be perfect. It never is. I'm a testament to that. In these early days I’m producing writing I think is good but others don’t. Take action.

Sometimes more than a week passes and I miss my writing target. I'm overthinking it again. Stick to the principles. It works with code so it will work with writing. I know I can do this.

5. Feedback

Where does your audience live? In your head? No. So stop dreaming you know what they want. Software is amazingly complex and you learn through feedback. Sometimes that feedback is positive but sometimes it's negative and that's ok. It's still feedback, it's still learning, it's still progress.

Stop writing like a know-it-all. You only have one brain but two ears so spend more time listening to feedback. Note to myself: check the stats to see what people want and produce more of that.

Our worlds aren't so different, writing and coding. Maybe I CAN work out this writing creatively thing. Time will tell. But with these coding principles and optimising for learning in practice, I have a greater chance of making the next viral post.

Commit. Push. Release.

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Business is hard and so is tech

Running a business is hard work. Understanding all the tech that goes with running a business is hard work. That’s hard work times hard work. Hard work squared. Nobody needs that.

Now I’m no business guru but I have worked in the tech industry for more than 25 years. So if I can help you turn tech into a business multiplier and you subscribe to this newsletter it’s a win-win for everyone. Yay!

Who the heck am I

I’ve spent more than two decades using my technical expertise to help governments and corporations. Programming, building website backends, monitoring services, cloud engineering, automating service delivery, out-of-hours support, racking and cabling servers in data centres. I’m like multiple, tiny, unknown cogs in an enormous Death Star when working at that scale; hidden away, my efforts go unrecognised.

Enough of this 9 to 5 working for someone else. I thought freelancing would be the freedom I sought but it was just more 9 to 5 without the corporate employee nonsense but way more business admin. Finding new clients, onboarding customers, invoicing, chasing payments, following up with routine requests, payroll, estimating work.

There has to be a better way.

That’s when it clicked. I should spend time automating my own business like I automated my client's businesses. Why not bring you along on my journey of how I’m building my business and using tech to accelerate my growth while still having time to relax with my family.

Finally, I can help the little man (or woman) get the best out of my tech experience and share in their success rather than being just a cog.

So if you run a business and need to up your tech know-how to get more done and more time back in your life you’ve come to the right place.

Learning to code as a kid was a superpower that has shaped my whole life. My 25+ year career in tech is a testament to that. But it could have been so different.

Love of the game

In my youth, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I wasn't from a rich family and I didn't have connections to smart people. I grew up in a single-parent family in a small city in the UK. I could have grown up to be anyone; a mechanic, a teacher, an accountant.

Like most teenage boys I loved video games and many evenings were spent at friend's homes patiently waiting for the cassette games to load. Sometimes it took 5 minutes for a game to load, other times it would fail and we'd have to rewind the tape and try again. But the excitement and anticipation of adrenaline-pumping gameplay, amazing pixelated graphics and precision joystick skills more than made up for the wait.

It never occurred to me that we could ever afford a computer of our own but my mum agreed to buy one so I'd be home more often. I was from a not-so-well-off migrant family so we had no option but to buy second hand. Scouring the classified pages of the local newspaper daily I looked for computers for sale; such was the method before the internet was available. On the face of it buying an old computer might seem second best but this would prove to be a defining moment in shaping my future.

A serendipitous meeting with a computer

I found one ad that looked good and we purchased from an elderly man who no longer needed his computer for his business, a Commodore 64. He demonstrated how it worked and it came with an array of addons that I've not seen before. There was the standard brown, chunky keyboard and tape drive; but also a 9-pin dot-matrix printer and a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. But the best bit was the 10 books on programming.

At first, the gaming at home seemed like a dream come true but the path to coding was layout out before me. I read every book and was soon coding my own basic games. I bought computing magazines that gave me more insider knowledge and tips. I was hooked. Maybe one day I'd be making and selling my own games. Little did I know at the time, or anyone else for that matter, how this would set me up for a career spanning decades working for multi-national corporations and governments.

Soon I got a reputation for being the geeky kid at school. I was already the nerdy kid because I was good at maths but I wore both as badges of honour.

From this newfound superpower will I turn out to be a friend or foe; a villain or vanquisher; a hero or heretic? Only time will tell.

Key takeaways:

• Buying second-hand brings about unique purchases. Don't overlook them.

• Follow your passion and don't think about making money. If you're good, it will come.

• Life is short, don't waste it being normal.

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