Who is Captain
Random?
I build things.
I've been building for the web since Macromedia — secondary school, freelance clients, production code. That ran in parallel with 23+ years in retail and hospitality leadership. Not a pivot. Not a career change. Always both, at the same time.
Right now the focus is agentic AI systems, full-stack web development, and the architecture that sits underneath both. Code is becoming a commodity. The value is in knowing how to structure what you build.
This site is a document.
Not a portfolio. A running record — what I'm building, what I'm learning, and what the work actually looks like in practice. That includes the failures. Success is a product of failures. You put in the work, you fail, you learn — that cycle is the whole thing. Pretending otherwise helps nobody.
Every post is written during or immediately after the work. Not reconstructed months later with the benefit of hindsight and marketing instincts.
The approach.
Everything starts with a user story. From there it goes deep — PRD, specs, plans, a full seven-phase development process before a line of code gets written. Spec-based development is something I've grown with over years of practice. It applies to everything: client work, personal projects, the systems I build with AI.
The instinct underneath all of it is the same one that earned the name. Move against the pack. Find the root cause. Solve the problem in a way nobody expected — and make it work.