Dean Howe

I taught myself to code at six, on a machine that couldn’t afford better software than what I could write myself. Dyslexic, and growing up in some of the poorest parts of 1980s England, neither of those things were supposed to add up to a senior engineering career across fintech, video streaming, and cybersecurity — but here we are.

What I actually build now is the same instinct as that six-year-old had: if the tool doesn’t exist, or costs more than it should, or answers to someone else’s roadmap, build the tool. A good chunk of what’s above runs on infrastructure I built myself — my own git forge, a realtime layer I’m building out, a payment rail of my own — not because renting is wrong (I still rent plenty), but because I’d rather understand the layers that matter most.

I’m a father to Ollie and Benjie, and that’s not a footnote — it’s the actual reason any of this is worth shipping in public instead of keeping it as private tooling. If Warrior or Moof save someone else the years it took me to build this by hand, that’s the whole point.