I'm Dan, a year old nerd based in Southampton in the UK. I work in AI and automation — designing strategies, building agents, and finding ways to make technology do the boring stuff so people don't have to.
This is my personal blog, the intersection of ambition and procrastination, and the pinnacle of using neon colours on a dark background to produce a design that looks like every AI product, ever. Here you'll find my thoughts on technology, writeups of what I've been working on, and documentation of my journey from "this should be easy" to "why is everything on fire?".
Oh, and that's me over there on the rightdown below. Or, at least, an AI generated avatar courtesy of o4-mini-high. And yes, it did start with a photo.
Current status:Connecting...
Now
At work
Getting into the new role — building Copilot Studio agents and Custom Engine solutions with Azure AI Foundry for Southern Communications Group.
On the side
Maintaining the Stepford County Railway Hub and experimenting with home automation — n8n, Claude, and a few too many webhook endpoints.
Thinking about
Whether "AI agent" is doing real work in your organisation or just wrapping a prompt in unnecessary infrastructure. Spoiler: usually the latter.
Not Everything Is an Agent (And That's Fine)
Everyone wants AI agents right now. Most things being called agents aren't, and most use cases being pitched as agent problems aren't either. Here's a framework for thinking clearly about when agentic AI is the right answer — and when it isn't.
Read More →Using AI to play BitBurner - Part 1: a swing and a miss.
I thought it might be fun to let a large language model hack around a network and try to steal lots of money from people. Luckily it wasn't a real network, and there was no real money involved.
Read More →The inaugural Group IT Infrastructure Day
Our team met to plan and prioritize 53 potential IT projects for the upcoming year, using a structured scoring methodology. We also had some toasties.
Read More →I made another purchase
I finally took the plunge and bought an Oculus Quest 2 VR headset, failed to read the instructions, and played "Epic Roller Coasters" for my first trip into VR. I nearly unmade another purchase.
Read More →Another blog?
Welcome to my latest attempt at maintaining a blog - this time it's going to be different, I promise!
Read More →Built with:
Claude AI
GitHub Copilot
Astro
TypeScript
Tailwind CSS
Node.js
VS Code
Azure
Docker
Cloudflare
Git