Twenty years of not cutting corners.

Before any of this, I spent twenty years in precision engineering — from engine maintenance to, now, aircraft maintenance in the UK. It's the kind of work with no room for "probably fine." Every torque spec, every inspection, every signature exists because a shortcut you can't see is still a shortcut.

A few years ago I started teaching myself iOS development — Swift, SwiftUI, the whole climb. Not to leave that discipline behind, but to point it somewhere new. The more I looked at how most apps handle personal data — recordings, documents, anything you'd rather keep to yourself — the more it looked like a shortcut nobody talks about: send it to a server "just in case," and hope nothing goes wrong.

That's what the four apps are built on. Every one of them is built so the sensitive part of the job — the audio, the transcript, the file — never has a reason to leave your iPhone. Not encrypted-in-transit. Not "trust us." Never sent at all, because the app was designed so there's nothing to send.

I build these apps with AI tools, and the apps themselves run AI models on your device. I don't see AI as something to fear or avoid. The useful question is how to use it so it works for you, and where your data ends up is a big part of the answer.

The blog is a separate thing, and deliberately broader. Writing about one narrow slice of tech got limiting fast, so it's grown into something closer to what we'd want to read ourselves: AI models, App Store dynamics, the odd product teardown, wherever the story actually is that week. The apps keep the strict rule. The blog just tries to be worth reading.

It's a small studio, still early, still building. But it's built the only way I know how to build anything that matters: check it twice, and don't ship what you wouldn't stake your own name on.