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Does Size Matter: The Rise of Smarter AI Models
The prevailing wisdom for LLM models has been that bigger means better. This assumption fuelled the growth of NVIDIA, Taiwan Semiconductor, and other AI hardware giants, as the demand for compute-intensive models skyrocketed. But this paradigm is starting to crack. Open-source models like DeepSeek-R1 have proven that smaller, cheaper-to-train models can be just as competitive as mainstream proprietary alternatives. The…
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How We Built Home Health: An AI-Powered Web App for Home Improvement
Introduction This story starts, like many good ideas, with a bit of curiosity and a product manager messing around with ChatGPT. They decided to see if AI could come up with job recommendations just by feeding it photos of his house. Turns out, it could. And that little experiment set us off on the journey…
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Heritage to Horizons: Leading Change at Checkatrade
I joined Checkatrade just over a year ago. In that time, our team has undergone a dynamic digital transformation; retiring monolithic systems, scaling incident management, launching a new consumer app, and embracing AI. Was it easy? No. Nope. Not at all. No way. Was it worth it? Oh my gosh yes. Here’s how we tackled…
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How We Decommissioned Heritage (Without Toppling the Tower)
This year I inherited Checkatrade’s long running ‘Heritage Switch Off’ project. All previous attempts had stalled, the supporting documentation was scattered to the wind, and all past contributors had left. The stakeholders offered me a bold suggestion: failure-driven migration. Flip the off-switch and fix whatever breaks. I had to make the tough call to take…
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Long Live Agility
Agile has come to mean doing half of Scrum badly and using Jira. – Andy Hunt, manifesto co-author One of my favourite talks was Agile is Dead by Dave Thomas from GOTO Amsterdam 2015. Dave is one of the manifesto for agile software development authors and quite a charismatic and enjoyable guy to talk to.…
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Reading List
Here is a collection of books I’ve picked up over the years, with some of my thoughts.