Homework Helper (1993/4) Whimsy

Written in BASIC on our family’s Amstrad CPC 464, I wrote programs to solve my maths homework questions for me. It worked a treat, but was probably slower than doing them myself given how long it took the tape drive to load into RAM!

Dolphin Bank (1997) Finance

Dolphin Bank (mid-90s) — Pre-PayPal concept for trusted web payments. Prototyped interfaces in Adobe Flash. Saw the same problem that Beenz raised $100m to solve — and also fail at.

Love Test (1998) Whimsy

A compatibility quiz written in Chipmunk BASIC on System 7. The plan was to sell it on floppies. Capitalism called early but nobody answered.

Quizzer (2002) Education

REALbasic educational flashcards with images and sounds. Direct ancestor of PeerMedicine.

StockBook (2005) Finance · Mac

First finance project. Traced Yahoo Finance chart images to extract valuations and track portfolios. REALbasic.

Dictionary (2005)

Raw TCP/IP sockets, C - look up dictionary terms from an online service.

Digital Radio Modem (200X) Hardware

University project. QPSK modulation. Comms engineering fundamentals.

The Buggy Project (2006) Hardware · Mac

University Project - control software and interface for an FPGA based robot. Team project. FPGA controlled the robot and serial comms. DTMF decoder circuit provided coordinates on a grid of various component boxes from an audio stream played to the robot. These would be forwarded via the FPGA serial link to my software (Pure C, running on Win32). I use GLUT for windowing, OpenGL for the interface. I implemented my own console with formatting and colouring, a 2D live “map” of the buggy’s location (to-scale), and outputs from each of the 7 test targets. Due to inadequacies of the DTMF decoding circuit, I also included error correction. Due to limited hardware availability, I used ZTerm on mac as a “fake buggy” to rapidly iterate my software. The route finding between the targets was a custom implementation of A* which built the route and then translated this to optimum (minimal turns) commands ordered for the buggy (again over serial).

InMyMac (2006) Web

Curated catalogue of great Mac apps. LAMP stack.

Mappin (2006/7) Web

LAMP social network for gap year students - live but never launched

Oxford Trading Analysis (2007) Finance · Web · AI

Wrote a back propagation neural network in C. Interfaced this with PHP FFI to a web front end. Downloaded Yahoo Finance! data for various stocks, attempted to predict the next few days movements, and charted the result. Ad supported. Didn’t beat the market—but made agreat talking point for my first job at a quant hedge fund.

A Cycle-accurate Hardware Profiling Unit for High-performance FPGA Computing (2007) Hardware · Performance

MEng Thesis project: FPGA Hardware Profiling Unit — Cycle-accurate profiling on a LEON3 soft processor to determine optimal hardware/software partitioning.

Stryder (2008) Finance · Mac

Objective-C/Cocoa app heavily inspired by Trade Strategist. TA-Lib integration with a custom interpreter (flex/bison). Allowed creating and running arbitrary algorithmic trading strategies and backtesting them. Precursor to MoonPilot

FPGA Financial Accelerator (2009) Finance · Hardware · Performance

Masters EE knowledge applied to finance. Hardware acceleration prototype.

iPortfolio Finance · iOS

Pre-SDK iPhone portfolio tracker. Complete but blocked by hedge fund contract.

Space Wellies Whimsy · iOS

iOS game with custom A* in C. Terrible graphics.

Smash Whimsy · iOS

Tubetastic iOS

Tube status app. Shipped.

Word Rain (2010) Whimsy · iOS

iPad word game with animation and sound.

Ransom Notes (2011) Whimsy · iOS

CoreGraphics. Shipped as paid app.

1337Tube (2011) Whimsy · iOS

Enhanced tube app with hacker theme and early TTS experimentation.

BoxView (2012) finance · iOS · Performance

Direct precursor of MoonPilot. Downlaod stock data, store in SQLite, caching layer, custom visual programming environment inspired by Quartz Composer with nods to Widgets. Bret Victors explorable explanations. Live backtesting. Performance optimisation.

Medify iOS App (2015) Medicine · iOS · Education

Complete iOS app built in a week during cardiology lectures. Never released. Have screenshots.

Visual Field Defects Medicine · Education

Moorfields. Interactive med ed app explaining cortical lesions and vision impact. PaintCode. Poster presentation.

HTM Implementation (2011)

Attempted implementation of Jeff Hawkins’ Hierarchical Temporal Memory in Objective-C. Read the book, tried to build it.

Cappuccino Enterprise App (2012/13)

One of the largest publicly-facing Cappuccino applications. Have screenshots.

Back Office Accounting System (2012)

Event sourcing in Obj-C, Xgrid for live failover, Bombax HTTP server, Cappuccino rich GUI. Ended up as an early no-code tool — views, tables, and database access all driven by configuration, not code.

SoSeatMe

iPad seating plan optimizer. GCDrawKit, custom genetic algorithm in C. Never shipped. (Sosumi reference.)

Cancer MDT Report Generator (2020)

Built while working as a junior doctor. Automated preparation of MDT reports by interconnecting hospital systems. Saved approximately 1.5-3 doctor-days per week. The impedance mismatch, fixed locally.

eInk Photo Frame (2020)

Atkinson dithering, Pi prototype, C on Arduino, hardware timers. Vertical integration in hardware.

Before Dawn

Reimplementation of the Flying Toasters from After Dark. ObjC.

MoonPilot (2025)

Visual programming environment for algorithmic trading. GPU charts, interpreter pattern, portfolio optimization, genetic algorithms, Swift 6 concurrency. The receipts.

Jack (2025)

AI PM for solo devs. Menu bar extra, GitHub integration, agentic tool use.

Cheer (2025)

Desktop decoration inspired by Holiday Lights.

PeerMedicine (2015-2025, intermittent)

Medical education platform. RAG, custom FSRS, curriculum as DAG, event sourcing