I started making websites twenty years ago, and at that time nobody thought to ask whether I was a designer or a developer. You just made the site, all of it, front to back, because that's what the job was. I cut my teeth on PHP and MySQL, building my own content management systems before tools like WordPress existed to do it for me and mocking up designs in Photoshop. That instinct, understanding the whole picture rather than one slice of it, has never really left. It's the dichotomy between design and code that's always pulled me in.

I spent my first decade running my own small studio, working directly with local businesses on custom builds and ecommerce sites. Eventually I wanted bigger briefs, so I joined an agency and spent a few years doing pure development. I learned a huge amount in a short space of time. I also missed design more than I expected to, which told me something useful about how I actually want to work.

These days I split my time between full front end builds for agencies, often stepping into large marketing sites for clients I'd never land on my own, and personal projects where the design, art direction and code are entirely mine. I've been lucky to work alongside agencies who care deeply about design, and some exceptionally talented designers. Watching good designers work has taught me so much.

For the last five or six years I've worked fully remote, based from home in Wales, with agencies and clients across the UK, Europe and the US.

Outside client work, I run a record label. Twenty-one years of album covers, art direction and production, alongside the label's own site, which I designed, built and maintain.

The work has never felt neatly divided, one minute I'm building a component, the next I'm talking through why a layout loses its rhythm on mobile, or why a navigation pattern feels awkward. Those conversations are some of my favourite parts of the job. 

Just like when I started, the line between design and development is blurring again. AI can write code and generate layouts well enough now that the bottleneck isn't output, it's knowing what's actually worth asking for, and when to trust what comes back. I've spent the last couple of years immersed in that world, running models locally, working across different tools and harnesses, building my own scripts and workflows, not as a novelty but as how I work day to day now.

LLMs and agentic coding have unquestionably set a new baseline for web development, but they're not a silver bullet. Lazy, AI generated work, created with questionable motives, is everywhere online. I see this flood of derivative, homogenous output as an opportunity to stand out with real, creative work that’s more ambitious and more technical. I'll continue to use it to widen my net and explore adjacent fields, bringing those into my work as well. Used with discipline, agents are an invaluable part of my process.