2025
The fact that I’m writing this review of 2025 in April 2026 indicates how crazy the past year has been. I’ve never grown so much personally and professionally as in 2025. I’ve also found new ways to deeply focus on difficult work amongst the chaos. So let’s dig into the highlights.
The best investment we’ve ever made
Raising a young family is the most challenging and rewarding thing we’ve ever done. As I write this, Rudy is about to turn two and is growing into such an amazing little man. All the clichés continue to be true. You learn so much from this little ball of excitement, and he’s constantly keeping us on our toes. The main lesson we learned was that when you have a sick child, literally nothing comes above that and you need to be ready (and willing) to drop everything else to support them in that moment. There’s something strangely reassuring in realising what’s really important in those moments, and although we both love our work, the health of your family will always be the most important thing to maintain.
We closed out the year by learning Ailsa is pregnant with our second child, which will complete us as a family. We’re so excited to grow the family and give Rudy a sibling. Louie remains passive to the news as he has to now support not one but two siblings in playing ball games outside.
Maturing as a CTO
I’m now over two years into the CTO role at Genio and I’m continuing to learn how to best operate at this level. It is not without its challenges, but I absolutely love leading the team and I’m finding out a lot about myself in the process. One thing that’s worth calling out is that I couldn’t do a challenging role like this alone, and the support of Ailsa has been then most incredible thing as I throw myself into work, I’ll forever be grateful for that.
The key change in how I’ve tackled the role in the past year is generally how I operate. It takes discipline and planning to ensure I operate at the right level that the role demands, thinking strategically about what is important to Genio as a business rather than delivering solely sound products through a mature engineering function. Taking time out of the day-to-day to plan how the ever-changing technology landscape affects the business and what we need to do to remain ahead of our competitors. I love this sort of work, but it’s certainly an adjustment coming from a hands-on Engineering background.
Drawing the conference to a close
I’m sure I’ll find time to write about this properly after the 2026 conference, but in 2025 I made the decision for this year’s conference to be our last. This was personally quite challenging for me. I love the community we’ve built around the Hey! Presents brand and the conference itself, and I love the buzz of running the conference itself even more.
It was a chat with Andy Bell following the 2025 conference that made me reflect on when the right time would be to draw this chapter of conferences to a close. I’d much rather go out on a high than fizzle out, and for some time it has been challenging to run the conference as it is with the changes in behaviour in terms of how people commit to events and how businesses support sending their people to indie conferences. I believe in these grass roots events as a fundamental way for people to learn, and that’s why I won’t stop doing them.
I have a strong belief that I’ll bring back a new conference in the future under a different concept, with a clearer purpose and articulation of value so it makes it much easier for companies to support. But I’ll save the thoughts on this for another time.
And so we’re over a quarter of the way into 2026, with our family growing and work becoming more demanding, it is a true stress test of our ability to organise ourselves both in and outside of work. I’m forever in awe of Ailsa as she takes pregnancy in her stride for a second time, and I’m very excited to see what the rest of 2026 brings.