I explain complicated technology to business people.

As a teenager, I wrote my first program on one of the display computers in the shop. 10 PRINT "SOMETHING RUDE ", 20 GOTO 10, RUN, then walk away and leave it scrolling for the next customer.

Turbo Pascal for my computer science A-level. I built a hotel booking system that ran entirely in memory off a floppy disk.

Two years of computer science and information engineering. They taught me predicate logic and Modula-2; I learned a lot more about alcohol, and left without the degree. That's a story for the Substack.

My first job: putting together custom PCs and selling backup tape streamers to businesses. Then Dell started selling made-to-order PCs direct, for less than we could build them, and our market disappeared. In hindsight, we should have moved into high-end custom gaming systems.

Selling computer games, and helping customers get them running: setting up Windows 95 and making boot disks so the games would load.

I joined the team that launched .tv, the UK's first television channel dedicated to technology, and produced Chips With Everything, a tech version of Gardeners' Question Time: viewers sent in questions, and a panel of industry experts and journalists, sometimes including me, explained the answers. One of my regular panellists later became my boss at ZDNet.

Reporter, then Chief Reporter for IT Week. Computer viruses were just taking off, and they became my beat: Blaster, Sobig, MyDoom, Netsky, Sasser and the rest. Along the way I got to know the researchers fighting them, and law journals still cite that coverage. My stories ran on CNET News.com and were picked up by Wired, SFGate and the Globe and Mail. Wired republished in full my story on the 18-year-old behind most of the year's PC virus infections (2004). I interviewed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who called rival PeopleSoft a "sinking barge" (2003), and covered Bill Gates predicting the death of the password at the RSA Conference (2004). One of the most amusing stories I wrote: Microsoft's lawyers went after a 17-year-old called Mike Rowe over his website, mikerowesoft.com, and Microsoft ended up admitting to ZDNet UK that it had taken its trademark "a little too seriously" (2004). Wikipedia's article on the case cites three of my stories.

I moved to take over the security beat from Patrick Gray, became editor, and rebuilt and trained a new team of technology reporters. When Patrick launched the security podcast Risky Business in 2007, I became its regular news voice from the second episode, for at least its first year. I asked Microsoft's head of product security, George Stathakopoulos, why Windows couldn't go six months without a patch (2004); Cisco's chief security officer, John Stewart, why customers weren't upgrading their routers (2005); and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, on camera, whether Google would admit to sharing user data with the US government (2008). I also questioned Ivan Krstić, now head of security engineering at Apple, on whether desktop security was broken beyond repair (2007); Linus Torvalds, on camera at linux.conf.au (2007 and 2008); Bruce Schneier, on why our sense of security is so often wrong (2008); and Microsoft's security chief, Scott Charney, in an eight-part video interview (2008). Along the way: Best News Journalist at the Consensus IT Writers Awards (2006), for a series on why antivirus software was failing, including "Eighty percent of new malware defeats antivirus", which was picked up around the world, and Best Technology Columnist at the Australian IT Journalism Awards (2007). With Brett Winterford, I also wrote "The green data center: An oxymoron?" (2007), on data-centre power long before AI.

A year full-time at iTnews, then freelance for ZDNet Asia, including IT Priorities, a video series filmed with CIO roundtables in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and India (2010). Words, pictures and video for InnovationAus, Microsoft, VMware, AWS, Cisco, WatchGuard, WithSecure, Snowflake and agencies across the UK, Australia and South-East Asia. Highlights: a video interview with F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen on the cyber arms race (2012), and AWS urging developers to scrub their secret keys from GitHub (2014). More recently, for InnovationAus: "The growing impact of SaaS on shared services" (2025).

For years I described technology and worked beside the designers, video producers and art editors who made it look good. Now I build the interactive explainers, tools and games myself. The judgement comes from thirty years of knowing what good looks like. AI just makes me faster. I still write, and I still make customer testimonial videos.