Version 33.0

Every year, in August, I attempt to sit down and write one of these. A kind of changelog of life with commit message to myself.

Fellow engineers will get the metaphor. For the rest of you - think of it like a birthday letter you write to yourself instead of receiving from others. No fluff. No performance. Just an honest look at what shipped, what broke, and what's still in progress, and what needed a ticket.

Homeowners.

So first-things-first, "we become homeowners." Saying it out loud and it sounds straightforward. Clean. Like a checkbox ticked. But buying a house - this house - was as much as an investment as much as our new project. A money pit disguised as a home. A beautiful, character-filled, never-ending unfinished series of decisions (and effort) we make every weekend.

There's something humbling about owning a property that needs you. It strips back any illusion that you've "arrived." Every time I feel like I'm getting ahead with a momentum - the house reminds me where the finish line actually is. Insulating walls. Leveling and battening our ceiling. Procrastinating all the things we don't want to do. It's also where I've learned the most this year as a DIYer, and not just on little weekend projects that moves it forward but patience. I'm not naturally patient. I like systems that run themselves, pipelines that execute without me. But a house doesn't work like that. You can't Lambda your way out of a damp wall or a leaky roof (we had two of them last year). The house is a lesson in slow work. Unglamorous, incremental progress. The fast-pace only exists on social media where you just see the compressed knowledge with final result.

Takeaway: Some of the most important investments you make aren't optimised for speed. They're optimised for permanence.

Going Deep.

So I doubled down on the local market, and it pulled me deeper into the Next.js ecosystem than I've ever been. I've built and shipped multiple websites this year. Full stack. Custom logic. Ongoing maintenance. Not quick jobs - actual relationships with clients where I'm the person they call when something breaks at 9pm, and also the person building the next feature at 6pm or the weekend.

Next.js, if you're not building with it yet, is the kind of framework that rewards the developers who take it seriously. The more you invest in understanding how it actually works - the rendering patterns, the edge cases, the performance tradeoffs - the more it gives back. It stopped feeling like a tool and started feeling like a language I was becoming fluent in.

The Google Reviews Module

This one started with a frustration.

Google Business reviews are one of the most powerful trust signals a local business can have. Every client I work with needs them. But getting them displayed properly - beautifully, on a custom website - has always been messier than it should be. Third-party widgets that look generic. Review platforms that cost more than they're worth. Janky embeds that break the design.

And then, after finally getting accepted into the Google Places API - which, by the way, took longer than it should - I sat down and built the thing I'd been wanting to exist to offer my clients for years.

A custom reviews module. A proper plugin my clients can actually use. Bespoke widgets that match each site's design. No generic third-party branding.

This is one of those things that doesn't sound glamorous from the outside, but from where I sit, it represents something I care about deeply: solving a recurring problem once, properly, and then packaging that solution so it keeps delivering value without extra effort.

It's the principle behind every good system I build. Write the function. Test it. Reuse it everywhere. Except this time, the function is a reviews widget. And the users are my clients' customers. And the outcome is trust.

The Stage. The Nerves. The Moment I Won't Forget.

Right. Let's talk about this one.

Back in April last year, I stood on a stage at one of the UK's biggest tech events - AWS London Summit 2025. In front of a room full of engineers, architects, and technology leaders. And I presented.

Let me rewind slightly, because context matters here.

A few years ago, the idea of presenting at an event of any size felt insane to me. Not uncomfortable - insane. I'm someone who builds things in the background. Infrastructure that runs invisibly. Systems that work while everyone else is asleep. The spotlight isn't exactly the natural habitat of a cloud solutions architect.

I actually vividly recall mentioning to my colleague at one of the tech events in Manchester couple years ago how insane it would be to present, and how I didn't think I could do it - wishing for courage. But the opportunity came, and I took it. Alongside Charlie from our AWS gang & Ben, two people I shared that stage with. The brief: present the hyper-personalisation solution we'd built on AWS using AWS Personalise. Talk about what we built, how we built it, and why it matters.

Months of prep followed. Rehearsals. More rehearsals. Then it was our turn. I'm not going to pretend the nerves weren't real. They were. The gap between "I've rehearsed this many times" and "there are hundreds of people in this room" is not a gap you fully bridge with preparation. You just decide to walk out anyway. And I did. And it worked. The response from people who attended was warm. The team delivered. We held it together. And when I walked off that stage, there was a feeling I didn't expect - not relief, exactly. Something closer to appetite. I want to do it again. A few years ago, I thought that sentence was impossible. Today it just feels like a goal.

Its true: The thing that terrifies you most is probably the exact thing that's waiting on the other side of the discomfort. You don't need to eliminate the fear. You need to lean into it.

Poland.

Every year, we make it back to Poland. And every year, it resets something in me that I didn't realise needed resetting. This year was simple. Quiet. No big trips elsewhere - the house saw to that. The budget has a new landlord now and its name is "renovation." But Poland delivered what it always does. Family. Food. And 60km on Lime Scooters.

So. Version 33.0.

A house that's a work in progress. A client base that's growing and deepening. A problem solved, packaged, and shipped. A stage conquered. A holiday earned. This isn't a perfect changelog. There are bugs I haven't fixed. Features I planned and didn't ship. Habits I started and dropped. The usual ADHD traits and procrastination. But version 33.0 shipped. And the things that happened last year weren't small. I stood on a stage in front of hundreds of people and didn't die. I bought a house and I'm not drowning. I built something useful for my clients and they're using it. I wrote more lines of Next.js than I could count and I genuinely enjoyed it.

That's enough. That's more than enough. Version 34.0 is already in staging as I was late, August fast approaching. I have already starting thinking about it - call it procrastination again. But that's the start.