Making things.
Making connections.

I’ve spent much of my career helping people understand what technology makes possible, and finding useful ways to put it to work. I also have a background in physics and teaching, and I consider these rather complementary to many aspects of my work in Field Engineering.

None of it has happened on my own. Em and our children, Jack and Zoe, are the centre of all of it: the reason for many of the choices below, and the people I most want to share the stories with.

My personal website has always been part notebook, part playground. Somewhere to try an idea, follow a question and make something I can show someone else.

From the Valleys to the web.

I was born in Stockport and grew up in the Valleys of South Wales. In 1981 my primary school got a BBC Micro, the first computer I ever used. It has been quite a distance from there to here, and curiosity about what these machines could do has carried me most of the way.

In 1993, I was studying high energy physics using data from CERN. I trained to teach, and my postgraduate research explored how multimedia and the young World Wide Web could be used in education. As a high school physics teacher, I took my pupils to the live data coming back from the Sojourner rover on Mars. By the late 1990s I was running after-school clubs on building for the web.

In 1998, I built Bookart for my dad, Paul Johnson. For a small independent artist based in Manchester, the website opened up patronage on the US West Coast. It’s still there, with remarkably little changed over the years. An early example of how something I built could make a material and significant difference to someone else.

It was always the building.

For a long time I thought it was the coding I loved. I did enjoy it, and still do. But looking back, what I really loved was the building: noticing something that I felt should exist, and then making it exist.

The coding I taught was never for its own sake either. The web clubs in the late ’90s, and the Code Club I ran at our local primary school for several years from 2014, were about self-expression. Coding gave children a way to communicate more widely and to make tools for their own lives. I wrote about getting kids into coding, drawing on many years of teaching and working with technology.

That is why this moment feels so exciting. Building is becoming far more accessible, and the emphasis is moving from writing code to making things. More people than ever can build, and communicate, with greater freedom and flexibility. I’ve given talks on the history of human communication, and this feels like one of its bigger steps: more people able to make the thing they can imagine.

Before the playbook.

In 2000, I switched professions and joined Dendral, an early AI and natural-language startup, probably ten years ahead of its time, as employee number two. Since then I’ve often joined companies before the playbook existed: Scene7 and then Adobe, Amplience, Cloudinary and Vercel. Each time, the work was helping customers understand what the technology could do for them, then building the team and the ways of working to do that well.

I spent more than five years at Vercel. I joined as its first dedicated Sales Engineer and went on to lead a Field Engineering team of 26 across the Rest of World, in EMEA and Asia-Pacific.

Along the way I wrote Practical Responsive Images, first published in 2017, and co-authored the Media chapter of the 2020 Web Almanac.

Understanding is something we build together.

Storytelling and education are central to how I work with customers. A meaningful demo starts from where the audience is, from understanding their current situation and context, and then exploring the potential opportunities and outcomes that could be feasibly realised.

I also think sales is a key part of education. You can ask someone to sit in front of a book, but engagement comes from recognising the value or interest in what’s there. We have to inspire that connection before the knowledge can become part of how someone understands the world.

Close, without being near.

In 2007, with our son still a baby, I didn’t want to miss him growing up. I became Adobe’s first official remote employee in Europe, and I’ve worked remotely ever since.

Remote work gives a working week balance and flexibility, and in my experience it makes people more productive and more effective, not less. It has let me be present for the everyday moments at home while working with customers and colleagues around the world.

Some of the best working relationships I’ve had were built across time zones, with people I rarely met in the same room. Trust, care and good conversations don’t depend on sharing an office.

Building our own things.

Alongside that work, Em and I have always built things of our own. Looking at them together, most share the same threads: family, memory, health and helping people tell their own stories. That isn’t a coincidence. Building is one of the ways we find, and reinforce, what we value.

ox10 was my small hosting company, looking after websites for small businesses, including my dad’s. Running our own hosting taught me a lot about what it takes to keep something online and cared for. Save Your Past helped families rescue and treasure their old photographs.

I started writing Storyus in 2017: a family-friendly storytelling platform, with no adverts, likes or follower counts, where each person has room to tell their part of the story. Haktive, encouraging healthy, active kids, is primarily Em’s, and I’m very actively involved.

Learning through play.

Playful experiments give people a way into an idea. The workbench lamp is a bit of showmanship: a button on my desk, a real lamp, and a website that changes with it. Behind that small interaction are feature flags and synchronisation, ideas that can connect much more complex tools and processes. Something familiar makes room for curiosity, learning, and imagining what else we could do.

The same instinct is behind the other experiments on this site, like following the sun around our roof. This site itself is one of them: rebuilt in Laravel, keeping React, with the practical steps shared along the way.

A practice of paying attention.

Project Photo365 starts with a simple commitment: take one photograph every day for a year. For me, it’s a reason to be more present. To notice the light, take a different route, or see something I’ve walked past a hundred times. The photographs become a record of a year, but the practice changes how I see the everyday as I move through it.

Most weeks, I gather the photographs the four of us have taken into albums. It’s a family chore I’ve kept since the children were born, and at the end of each year, I choose nine. Curation is an act of love.

Travelling together.

Em and I have always loved travelling, and we love travelling as a family. Seeing how other places solve the same everyday problems differently unpicks assumptions I didn’t know I had. Iceland was incredible, and so was Japan, where we celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary with Jack and Zoe.

Our two-month European road trips have been some of the most important times for our family. Senna, our dog, came on the last one with us. We enjoy lots of very long walks together, and many of our plans for the future, campervans included, revolve around her. Some of our favourite days are much closer to home, in Cumbria and on Harlech beach.

We share those stories through more meaningful channels than a feed. Storyus means I can also weave them into this website in ways that suit them. A collection can become a year in photographs; a walk can become something you travel through as you read.

In Hillfort to Hillfort, the location data already stored in the photographs’ EXIF metadata gives each moment a place on the map. As you scroll through the photographs, the map follows the journey. The geography becomes part of the telling: the distance between moments, the paths connecting them, and the landscape we were moving through.

Legacy, in both directions.

Dad’s bookmaking and teaching, including A Book of One’s Own, and my work on Storyus share a thread: helping people tell stories of their own.

For me, legacy looks forwards as well as backwards. The experiences we share with our children keep earning a kind of compound interest. They expand our perspective, becoming part of the lens through which we see and navigate life. I wrote about one of those days in On Harlech beach: five hours walking the length of the beach with my son.

Photographs, words and stories give us ways to return to those experiences, and to share what they mean to each of us.

the stories we tell about our life, become the story of our life

See what I’m making, or spend some time with my writing.