About

I’m Jake. Engineer, sailor, and the kind of person who sees the same design principles in a sailboat rig as in a data architecture.

I grew up in Brighton on the south coast of England. My first programming experience was editing MySpace profiles in high school, followed quickly by creating websites with Dreamweaver and making Flash animations. The possibilities felt limitless. They still do.

I studied Computer Science at the University of Brighton, moved to Philadelphia in 2013, and have spent the years since building across e-commerce platforms, web applications, and data systems. Today I work at Convictional, where we’re building tools that help teams collaborate, align, and decide in AI-enabled workplaces.

Off the clock

My office is often the saloon of my sailboat, a 1985 Endeavor 33 named Solstice. Living on a boat means being your own plumber, electrician, and navigator. It’s a crash course in 'extreme ownership' and technical debt. When you’re on the water, you can’t abstract away a leaking thru-hull fitting. That grounded, no-nonsense reality is what I try to bring to my work. If it doesn't work when things get messy, it doesn't work.

When I’m not solving problems with code, I’m probably working on Solstice, cooking, tinkering with off-grid electronics, or making a rug. I’m a morning person, an ENTJ, and English, which means I can be more blunt and sarcastic than the situation calls for. I’m working on it.

I believe the best work happens when you find purpose and peace at the same time. Not one at the expense of the other.

What I write about

This site is where I think out loud about systems, leadership, and decisions. How do you design organizations that learn? What does it mean to lead when AI is reshaping how we process information? How do you build software that actually changes how people work, not just digitizes what they already do?

I ground my writing in things I’ve actually built, decisions I’ve actually made, and frameworks I’ve actually used. I name the tools, reference the PRs, and admit when something didn’t work. If I’m speculating, I’ll say so.

Sometimes I write about engineering. Sometimes about data. Sometimes about the sea. The through line is always the same: how do you bring order to complexity and keep the ship afloat without pretending the complexity away?