I've been meaning to start writing for a while. Not for any particular reason — no big career shift, no burning insight I needed to get out. It just felt like the right time to start.
So here we are.
Who I am
I'm Harrison. I've spent the last 15 years building software across the full stack — from the functional php days, through early frameworks like Symfony and Laravel, and some experiemental ones along the way for good measure. Building front-end applications with JS frameworks (Angular, Vue and React), and more recently exploring data engineering and machine learning. Most of my work sits at the intersection of TypeScript, cloud platforms (GCP primarily), data engineering, and more recently, ML and AI.
It's a broad remit, and I've come to think that's a feature rather than a bug. The most interesting problems tend to live at the boundaries between disciplines.
What I work on
Day to day, I split my time across a few domains:
Cloud & infrastructure — designing and maintaining systems on GCP, mostly with Terraform. I care a lot about infrastructure that's legible, maintainable, and doesn't surprise you at 2am.
Data engineering — building pipelines, working with BigQuery and Dataflow, making sure the right data is in the right place at the right time. This space has changed enormously in the last few years and I find it genuinely exciting.
Full stack development — TypeScript end to end, frameworks like Next.js and Svelte on the front, Node and Python applications on the back, utilising serverless and virtual compute.
AI development — this is where most of my attention is right now. I've been building with LLMs for a couple of years and the space is moving fast enough that I want to document what I'm learning as I go. Agent orchestration, tool use, evaluation, the gap between demos and production — there's a lot worth writing about.
Why build in public
Honestly, I write to think. Getting something out of my head and into words forces a level of clarity that just thinking about it doesn't. If it's useful to someone else, that's a bonus.
I'm also tired of the pattern where engineers do genuinely interesting work and then say nothing about it. Not everything needs to be a conference talk or a polished essay. Some of it can just be: here's what I built, here's what I learned, here's what I'd do differently.
That's what this blog will be. A mix of technical deep dives, architecture decisions, things that broke in interesting ways, and whatever's occupying my thinking at any given time.
Starting with AI — because that's where most of my energy is right now, and there's a lot I want to say.