I have been off work since January. That was not the plan, but that is how it went.
I took the time to actually stop. Then I competed in my first weightlifting competition as an athlete. We went to Jamaica as a family. Both of those things reminded me what it feels like to be fully present somewhere.
If I am honest, I did not really start looking properly until after the competition. And even then, things moved slower than I expected.
When things move slower than you expect
There was a moment where I had to decide how to sit with that.
I chose not to panic.
I looked broadly. The police force, public sector, fintech, renewables. All interesting spaces, all doing important work. But the more I looked around, the clearer something became.
I still have more to do in ecommerce. There is something unfinished there for me. The complexity of it, the scale, the way technology and commerce intersect at pace; I am not done with that world yet.
So rather than forcing a move into something new for the sake of it, I leaned into the time I had.
Rebuilding my corner of the internet
I went back to frontend development, which I had not touched properly in years. I started learning again. Not frantically, but properly.
One of the things that came out of that period was rebuilding this site. It had been offline for four years. Getting it back up became part of the learning process.
I used Claude Code throughout. It helped me get back to where I was as a developer and, honestly, further. But what I learned quickly is that AI is not a shortcut for knowing what you are doing.
You still need to be the developer in the room.
Claude missed things I did not prompt for. Accessibility was one. Background image layout shifts were another. Image optimisation, how images are served, how pages load. Unless you know to ask, it does not know what you have not thought about.
That is not a criticism. It is just how it works.
We are all learning
Prompting well is a skill. Knowing what to check is a skill. Knowing when the output is wrong is a skill. None of that is replaced by the tool.
The site being live is the achievement. Not because it is technically impressive, but because it is mine. My posts from 2017 sit next to posts from this year. You can see the journey. LinkedIn does not give you that. The algorithm buries everything. Here, nothing gets lost.
Everything happened in its own time. I think that was the point.
