A slightly unconventional CV, written in full, somewhere between a blog post and a confession.
I got into web development the way most people my age did. Messing about, breaking things, Googling why they broke, and slowly piecing together something that actually worked. By my early to mid teens I was building things properly in PHP, and somewhere along the way I got deep enough into the CodeIgniter framework that I wrote an entire book about it.
That book was published four days after my 18th birthday. I am still not entirely sure what I was thinking. But there it was, in print, with my name on the cover. I had gone from a kid teaching himself to code to a published technical author before I was old enough to buy a pint in a pub.
For a few years I kept building, kept working on web projects, kept doing what I was supposed to be doing. And then life had other ideas.
When I was 24, I lost both of my grandads. Around the same time, I got laid off from my job. All of it coming at once was enough to make me decide to quit web development altogether. Probably silly in hindsight, but I do not entirely regret it — I met Melody doing the door work, which counts for rather a lot.
I got my door supervisor licence and started working the doors. Three shifts a week, the odd festival contract, a bit of travelling around for short security gigs. It was not exactly a career plan, but it suited me at the time. Fresh air, no laptops, and the kind of work where you had to be present because the job demanded it.
Melody was working at the same venue. We have been together nine years now, married for three, and she has been alongside every twist this story has taken since.
Melody and I, early days. She has since forgiven me for most of my career decisions.
Three years went by like that. Three years of night shifts and high-vis jackets and genuinely not minding any of it. Then the savings ran out, and I had to think again.
I retrained as a lorry driver. I am not sure what the average person imagines when they hear that, but it was genuinely one of the best decisions I have made. Six years behind the wheel. Milk lorries in the early mornings, curtainsiders hauling loads across the country, tipper trucks delivering tarmac and stone to road crews and building sites.
You see a lot of the country from a cab. You think a lot. You get very good at reversing into tight spots and very bad at remembering to charge your phone. It is a profession that does not get nearly enough credit, and I look back on those years with a lot of respect for what the job actually involves.
But the itch to build things never fully went away. It sat there quietly, waiting.
In what I can only describe as a completely rational response to spending six years in a lorry cab, I retrained in accountancy and started my own firm. Tax returns, bookkeeping, small business accounts. The kind of work that sounds dry until you realise how much it genuinely helps people who are just trying to run their businesses without drowning in paperwork.
While I was doing that, Melody and I had been talking for a while about making a proper move. We had looked at various places. Thailand kept coming back up. Lower cost of living, warm weather, a genuinely vibrant expat and digital nomad community, and the kind of lifestyle that lets you work hard on your own terms rather than someone else's.
Adam and Melody, now based in Thailand. The dream, more or less.
So we did it. We moved. The accounting work has not quite worked out the way I hoped, which is what has pushed me back properly to building things on the internet. We need to make enough to keep going here in Thailand, and web projects feel like the right way to do it.
These days I am building out a handful of web projects, some around travel and the digital nomad lifestyle, some around tax and financial survival guides for people who are self-employed or running small businesses, and some community-based apps I am hoping will find an audience. The goal is to get enough of them generating income that we can keep going comfortably here in Thailand.
I am glad I have my base in PHP, even if it is ten years out of date. I have rapidly got back to near where I used to be in terms of development standard, and with AI coding the bulk and me checking it over, it is even easier to get a lot of projects up and running. The thinking still has to be yours, but the time it takes to go from idea to something real has shortened dramatically.
If any of that sounds familiar, or if you are on a similar path, I would love to hear from you. Drop me a line.
A few things I am building. More to follow.
A straightforward, low-cost way to create an unenrolled deed poll for a name change in the UK. No solicitor needed, no jargon just the document you need.
mydeedpoll.uk Accounting & TaxPlain-English tax guides for freelancers, sole traders, and small business owners who just want to get it right without hiring an accountant for every question.
taxsurvivalguides.uk Travel & Digital NomadResources, guides, and honest information for people working remotely and moving around the world. Built from experience, not from a listicle.
nomadscoop.com Lab & WIPWhere the half-finished things live. Sites in progress, ideas being tested, and projects that are not quite ready to go anywhere near a proper domain yet.
xelra.devUpload a bank statement, get a formatted statement of accounts out the other end. Built to save accountants and bookkeepers the manual work of doing it by hand.
Coming soonOne global thread. Everyone talking, all at once — a replacement for the Reddit megathread format done properly. No subreddits, no fragmentation, just a single live conversation that anyone can join.
Coming soon