I am not a coach

I don't have a certification. I don't have a client list, a framework with my initials on it, or a cohort starting next month.

What I have is thirteen years in tech, across different domains, different countries, and a lot of different people. And over the last couple of years, more than twenty developers who sat down with me and asked what to do next.

That's it. That's the whole qualification.

I'm telling you this up front because the honest version is more useful to you than the packaged one. If you want someone with a methodology, there are people who are genuinely good at that and I'm not one of them. What I'm good at is having a normal conversation with someone about their work, and asking the question they've been avoiding.

What I noticed after about the twentieth conversation

People in tech are the same everywhere.

I mean that almost literally. The fears are the same, the imposter feeling is the same, the "am I actually senior or did I just survive long enough" question is the same. The only thing that really changes as people climb is the ego, and even that changes in predictable ways.

So you'd think the advice would travel. It doesn't. And it took me a while to work out why.

It's not the people that differ. It's the room.

The same job, three different rooms

Work in the US, and people are upfront to the point of bluntness. They'll tell you what's not working, what they need from you, and what they want next, usually without being asked twice. It can feel harsh if you didn't grow up in it. It's also efficient, and you always know where you stand.

Work in Thailand, and it's calmer. Things move at their own pace and the relationship sits at the centre of everything. You don't open with the problem. You build the relationship, and the problem gets solved inside it. Push for a blunt answer too early and you'll get a polite one instead, and you'll think you've been agreed with when you haven't.

India depends entirely on which building you walked into. In startups it can be brutal. You'll find people swearing at their juniors as a matter of routine, in the open, and everyone acting like that's just the pace. In a large MNC there's decorum, and the swearing happens privately with the colleagues you actually trust.

Now think about what that means for advice.

"Just tell your manager you want the promotion" is reasonable advice in one of those rooms and actively bad in another. "Push back in the meeting" will get you respect in one place and quietly filed under difficult somewhere else. Most career advice on the internet is written from inside one room by someone who's never stood in the others, and it's handed out as if it's universal.

That's most of what I do in a session. Not answer the question. First work out which room you're standing in, because the answer changes.

Why this exists

Here's the part that actually keeps me going, and it's not complicated.

I like watching people grow. I like it more than I like shipping things, which took me an embarrassingly long time to admit to myself. When somebody I sat with six months ago messages to say they got the role, or they finally had the conversation they were dreading, that's better than any launch I've been part of.

I don't think that's a small thing to build a site around. I've had a lot of help from people who had no reason to help me. This is me trying to pay some of that back, and honestly, to keep learning — because every one of those twenty conversations taught me something I didn't know about a domain, a company, or a way of working.

That's why there's a site instead of a form.

So I built the whole thing myself

My writing was on Medium. My bookings were on Topmate. Both fine, both somebody else's, and between them they turned a conversation into a funnel.

If the point is a normal conversation, the software shouldn't behave like a sales pipeline. That one sentence decided nearly every technical choice here, and three of them are worth explaining.

No email service

There's no transactional mail on this site. No verification codes, no magic links, no newsletter, nothing that turns you into a row on a list.

The obvious problem is reminders. If you book a session and I can't email you, how do you get reminded?

You get an .ics file. Your own calendar fires the alarms, one at twenty four hours and one at one hour. The reminder comes from your phone, not my server. It works offline, it works if my server is down, and it works if you never hear from me again.

There's still an email address. When I write to you, it's by hand, from a normal mail client, like a person.

Nobody has to create a key

Including me, and this is the one I got wrong first.

The original plan was end to end encryption. The server would hold bytes it genuinely couldn't read. I built it. It worked. The tests passed.

It also meant that before I could save a single draft, I had to complete a key ceremony — generate it, confirm it, write down a recovery phrase, store the phrase somewhere that isn't the laptop holding the key. And I couldn't opt out. The one person who can't skip the ritual is the owner, and the owner is the one who has to open the editor every week.

A blog where writing a post starts with a cryptography ceremony is a blog with nothing in it.

So I took it out and replaced it with encryption at rest. That's a weaker claim and I want to be exact about how much weaker — it protects a stolen database or a leaked backup. It protects nothing from me. The security page on this site says that in those words, because the dangerous part of walking back a security claim isn't the walking back, it's the sentence somewhere else you forgot to update.

One box, and I can leave it

Everything runs from one file. The database sits off the box. Backups go out nightly, and there's a script that takes a bare server to a running site.

The point isn't that it's cheap, though it is. The point is that leaving is an afternoon rather than a project. Free tiers are lovely right up until they're an experiment you can't end.

Come and use it

There's a playground here where you can break a system and watch what happens. There's a library of the questions people actually ask, organised by the situation you're in rather than by topic. And there's a button to book twenty minutes with me.

If you're stuck on something, bring it. I'd rather hear a real problem than a polished one, and I promise not to hand you a framework.

I'm not a coach. I've just been doing this a while, in a few different rooms, and I'd like to be useful.