I’m a Staff Software Engineer at Google Labs in London, where I prototype interfaces that help people make good use of AI models. Most recently I led the UI architecture for Opal’s visual editor, a node-based canvas where people build multi-step AI workflows; it won the 2026 Webby for Best AI Agent.

I’ve been making things for the web since the early 2000s: first at agencies in Newcastle and Sweden, then at Google from 2012 where I worked in Chrome Developer Relations.

There I wrote and talked a lot about rendering performance, and MC’d Google I/O and Chrome Dev Summit. That’s where the FLIP animation technique came from, along with the Supercharged videos and most of the posts and tutorials on this site. It’s also where I created Lighthouse, which grew into something far bigger than the side project it started as. The posts are all still here, because people still link to them.

After DevRel I spent a year at DeepMind, then went back to Chrome as a tech lead and manager on DevTools. There my team overhauled the whole frontend, moving it to ES modules, TypeScript and Web Components, without a single outage; the measure of success was not breaking things. Then I spent a couple of years at Spotify, helping set the long-term direction for its desktop and web clients, before coming back to Google to join Labs.

Theology and AI

Alongside the day job I’m also a part-time DPhil student in Theology at Oxford, working on the intersection of Theology and AI. It follows an MSc in Philosophy, Science and Religion at Edinburgh, which I finished with a Distinction in 2022. While my studies might look unrelated to my work (and to some degree they probably are), to me there is a question underneath both: how do the things we make affect the people who use them?

Photography

When I’m not at a keyboard I’m usually out with a camera, mostly after wildlife or London at night. Some of it ends up on Instagram, and some of it might end up here.

King’s Cross and St Pancras at dusk, with the City skyline behind
A robin on a green railing The front of a black cab, with orange reflections across its bonnet Two pilot whales surfacing in deep blue water A bald eagle in profile

This site

Aerotwist is where all of that comes together, or at least where I’m trying to make it. The logo is one I designed, and there’s a 3D printed copy on my wall; I wrote about making it.