At the beginning of October, I set myself a challenge: Ship something every day of the month. Part 3 of 3 in my CMS Migration Series: Feeding the AI Vampire: A CMS Migration [Part 1] Is the Vampire Juice worth the squeeze: A CMS Migration [Part 2] I'd been feeling the need to shake things … Continue reading Ship Every Day in October: A CMS Migration [Part 3]
It's been a while since I've been this deeply involved in writing code. Or, perhaps more accurately, orchestrating the writing of code. Over the last six weeks, alongside my regular responsibilities as Head of Engineering, I've been migrating our websites away from Contentful and Sanity to Payload CMS. Part 1 of 3 in my CMS … Continue reading Feeding the AI Vampire: A CMS Migration [Part 1]
Visual Studio Code changed the game for me, and this documentary feels like a fitting tribute to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHL3XzjpT5w My programming journey started in a BBC Micro at school. Then, out of necessity to play early PC games, I became proficient at editing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. If that sentence means nothing to you, look up … Continue reading Was VS Code peak IDE?
The bottleneck moved The week after Agile on the Beach was an odd one. One day I was supporting our CPO with the board pack, pulling together the engineering story: six months of delivery, tidied into charts. Another I took off to spend at my friends' company, helping them work out how to adopt AI, with the … Continue reading The Bottleneck Moved: An H1 2026 Update
After my talk at Agile on the Beach 2026, a Software Engineer Leader from John Lewis & Partners came over with a question I wasn't expecting. He didn't ask which model we use, whether we prefer Cursor or Claude Code, or which MCP servers I'd recommend. He asked about the AI framework I'd mentioned almost in passing. Could I … Continue reading AI Needs Human Guardrails Too
A few months ago I shared our Q1 AI update and, more recently, some thoughts on our new PDP release at Collecting Cars. Looking back, both stories were really about the same thing. A relatively small engineering team shipping more than I would have thought possible even a year ago. At the time, the conversation … Continue reading Acceleration (Boooost), Confidence and Defence
This week we released PDPv2. Our NextJS Product Display Page. The show me the money page! You can see it for yourself on Collecting Cars and Watch Collecting. The most critical page on the platform. The page where excitement peaks, auctions end, bids fly in, and reliability matters most. If this page fails, we lose revenue, … Continue reading PDPv2 “The Money Page” Released
Foundations To Outcomes A page refresh that took ten weeks in the last iteration took under a week this quarter. Same team. Same headcount. Different way of working. I lead a team of 7 engineers, a data engineer, and a DevOps specialist at The Collecting Group. In Q1 we shifted AI impact across our codebase … Continue reading AI First Q1 2026 Summary
A fireside follow-up, and the bits I wanted to underline I recently did a fireside chat follow-up to my AOTB 2025 AMA talk. It was meant to be simple. A few questions, a few stories, a bit of reality from the last 6 to 12 months. What I didn’t expect was how clearly a few … Continue reading AOTB Fireside Follow-up
In October 2025 I left Collecting Cars to try something new. Four months later, I’m back. The other role didn’t land how I’d hoped, and in that time I realised how much I missed what we have here: the team, the platform, and yes, the cars. I’ve rejoined as Head of Engineering. Thank you to … Continue reading Back at Collecting Cars
