So it’s been a little while since I posted here - nearly 5 years. I’ve had very little to say in public, work and life have been a lot of fun, and I’ve not missed writing.

A lot has changed in that time: I joined Google in London, turned 40, got married, relocated to San Francisco, and at the end of last year our daughter arrived.

A lot has stayed the same too. When I look at my writing I’m happy to see some continuity with my work at Google. There I ended up tugging on a thread of “user interfaces for local intelligence” which manifested across many products I worked on: Auto Awesome Movies, the Android launcher, Smart Text Selection, and Federated Learning (not an exhaustive list). I’ve particularly enjoyed working with a mix of designers, engineers and researchers.

And to hammer home the point about continuity, my last post here touched on the tortoises of W. Grey Walter; fittingly, in August I’m moving to X to work in robotics. More interfaces, more intelligence, a new domain.

This is why I’ve resurrected this site: to get some hands-on experience I’ve been playing at the edges of the DIY Robocars movement, building a Donkey and trying to get it running reliably around The Panhandle, a nearby park. I want somewhere to share what I’m doing; this site will do nicely, thank you.