Maths, Music, and the software in between
I didn’t set out to be a problem solver. I set out to be a performer: singing with an a cappella group called D7, gigging anywhere from Rocking the Daisies to weddings. Real life had other plans; I ended up crisscrossing the country repping dog food instead.
When my daughter was born, the road gave way to something steadier: a teaching job in East London found me before I went looking, drawing on a Music background I didn’t expect to use again. What followed was a slow drift into Mathematics and Computer Science: the same problem, solved again, never twice under the same name.
The Dog Food Years · Data‑driven
SuperVet was a venture started by my father and his friend. When they needed a rep, I took it on, visiting hundreds of vets across the country and becoming good enough that sales grew significantly. Along the way I redesigned the packaging, a detour into branding that helped drive the food’s popularity. It was a product worth being proud of: its regulatory standards were stricter than some baby foods’, which sounds like a joke until you check it.
Growing sales hid a quieter problem: the bag printer’s minimum order quantities didn’t match how fast each variant sold, so a single print run could lock up years of stock in the slow movers. The chart below traces sell-through against those minimums.
Music · Outcome-based project management
My Music career started at twelve, at the Drakensberg Boys’ Choir, where I learned discipline less as a rule than a kind of group physics: everyone solving the same problem at once. That synergy took me from Spain to Japan to Norway.
My Master’s pulled the focus tighter, into Music’s technical side: critical listening, recording, mixing, signal flow, which turned out to share more with programming logic than expected. That sparked an interest in acoustics: garage sessions taught me the practical world rarely matches the textbook ideal, which eventually led me to design a proper studio at my current school, including the bass traps below, where a low frequency is caught, reflected, and absorbed before it can stand as a room mode.
Teaching and Coding · User convenience
Music followed me into the classroom. I’ve taught at two schools, in long stretches at each, covering Maths and Music equally, but Maths was always where my heart sat: it never stops asking.
Years in the school system showed me a gap nobody was fixing: a problem that looks administrative from the outside and structural from the inside, the same kind I’d been solving in sales figures and choir formations without ever naming it. The information needed to solve it lives scattered across different places, hard to see in context. Once I’d finished my degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, I built for convenience, starting with TimeView. The second tool, Kitchen Costings, grew out of the same instinct applied closer to home: my mother runs a catering business after hours, and pricing a menu by hand was eating time she didn’t have, so I built her something to do it for her.
A school’s whole timetable from one JSON file: browse by teacher, student or subject, no server, nothing leaving your machine.
Recipe costing for home bakers: paste a recipe, it parses the ingredients, prices them against a pantry, and works out cost per serving. Local-only, no accounts.
And everything else
Beyond all that, I am a father of three: a full-time job before the actual one starts. Between teaching, after-school lessons, and choir, the days run long: planning, problem-solving, and keeping everybody (mostly) happy.
If anything, it’s made me hungry for a challenge. I keep taking on new things to learn, not to fill spare time that I don’t have, but because growing in new directions is another problem worth solving.