I tinker.

I'm all things software — I explore and break much, design and build less, and lately I walk with LLMs. Twenty years in, I still treat every unfamiliar stack as a thing to take apart.

By trade I'm a full-stack and scientific-computing engineer with a Computer Science & AI degree behind me. Over the years the work has been LAMP sites and XSLT templating, Angular and React SPAs, Go email protocols and Python data pipelines — a different stack most engagements, which is how I ended up as the person who translates between teams and steps into whatever needs doing. Right now I engineer ML-driven automation for cryo-electron microscopy at Diamond Light Source: a FastAPI backend, a React front end, and a microscope agent that turns model recommendations into instrument-API calls.

Off the clock I run a self-hosted homelab — a Forgejo forge, a CouchDB + Garage data plane, a Calibre library, and a Claude Code toolkit that logs its own sessions — all scripted so it rebuilds from scratch. What holds my attention now is AI-assisted engineering: not the prompts, but the harness the agents actually run inside. And across every role, the through-line has been hiring, mentoring, and building the tools that do the work.

This site is built from src/, deployed via Cloudflare Pages, and updated when I have something to say. The source lives at forge.tinkerlab.dev/…/tinkerlab.dev-homepage.