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About

Twenty years of design, a few failed startups, one company that worked, and more homemade software than I probably need.

Steven in a kayak below a limestone peak
Out on the water
The Stora team on their trade show stand
Stora, since 2021
A long-exposure photo of a waterfall in an autumn forest
From my photography days
Steven with a pack of huskies
Channelling my inner @levelsio
Steven standing by a campervan on a country road
The campervan year
DaySight showing today's sunrise and sunset
DaySight, one of my tools
Steven with a glass of wine in a grand glass-roofed arcade
Sampling wine in Milan
Steven hiking up a rocky trail in the Altai Mountains
Hiking in the Altai Mountains
Steven with deer in a park
Nara, Japan

Story

I've been a designer for twenty years. I co-founded Stora, self storage software used by 650+ customers around the world, and I'm now our Chief Product & AI Officer. I've been building it since 2021 and it's where most of my time goes.

Before that I launched a lot of startups, and most of them failed. I've always been a tinkerer. I jump into things I don't understand yet and figure them out as I go.

These days that tinkering is mostly software. I build my own tools with Claude Code and Codex, little apps that fit exactly how I work, and there are more than a dozen of them on my Mac now. I think everyone should be doing it, whether they can code or not.

I still pay for plenty of software. I sell it for a living, after all. But before I buy anything now, I ask one question: buy or vibe?

That's most of what I write about here, along with how AI is changing the job itself. The best place to start is You Should Be Building Your Own Software, and you can see everything I've built.

Outside work I've always been happiest somewhere new. I spent years doing landscape photography, worked from a campervan along the Wild Atlantic Way, and travelled whenever I could. Now the adventures are closer to home, with my wife Vera and our daughter.

Now

October 2026

  • Growing Stora into Europe's biggest self storage software platform.
  • Getting Platter ready for other people. It's the Mac app I use to keep all my local projects in one place.
  • Writing more about personal software, and where the line between buying and building sits.

How I build

My own tools

  • PlatterWhere all my local projects live: previews, logins, sessions
  • SkillamanjaroBrowsing and editing the skills I've built for my agents

Agents

  • Claude CodeBuilds most of my software, including this site
  • CodexMy other coding agent, alongside Claude Code

Around the agents

  • FlowI dictate most of my prompts now
  • agent-browserLets the agents open, click through and screenshot real pages
  • MCP connectorsAgents read my email (Spark), meetings (Granola), Linear and Slack
  • SkillsMy own reusable instructions, so agents work the way I do

Shipping

Elsewhere

If you're building your own stuff too, I'd love to see it.

Get in touch X LinkedIn