The path to Big Tech

Right off the bat, I want to say I don't speak for Google in any way, shape, or form. I'm just a guy with a keyboard, an internet connection, and some opinions.

It’s been so peculiar working on the inside after years of looking in as a journalist, especially now with the spectacle of Google Cloud Next 2026 in full swing as I type this.

I mean that in the best way possible. Call me biased, and you should, but Google is a fantastic place to be; there are so many smart people tackling planet-scale problems. I’ve been here just shy of a year, and the learning curve is still vertical.

Where it all began

I took a rather circuitous route to get here. I graduated from the University of Warwick in the UK with a master's degree in electronics engineering, could write code as well as design circuits, and did some work in the embedded space. But being young and impatient, I caught the journalism bug, and left hardware design behind. The website I built for my university's student newspaper, The Boar, won a national award. I also edited the Drobe website that covered Arm systems before they were cool. I later worked in newspapers as a reporter and then as a production journalist, editing copy and laying out pages including special editions covering the 2011 England riots.

Life as an IT journalist

Then I found the perfect intersection of news and technology: I joined The Register, a UK-based IT news publication that has long been known for its acerbic take on all things enterprise IT and software development. We always advocated for our tens of millions of readers, the customers of the Big Tech vendors, rather than cheerleading the industry, and strived to be technical, practical, and entertaining. I kept in touch with tech by writing open-source software, speaking to engineers about their work, and using the tools our readers used.

Joining the Big Tech tent

I left The Reg as its editor-in-chief in 2025 to join Google as a technical editor, where again the focus is on making sure users as well as their AI agents have access to the best information they can get to build the products and services they need. I've been living full-time in San Francisco since 2014.

While in media, I kept a lid on my personal opinions, and any professional views I had, I'd express through the pages I was editing and overseeing. Now I'm out of the publishing game, I'll be using this space to air my thoughts on the industry, the technology, and the people building it. And, from time to time, my thoughts on life outside of Big Tech.

This post was quite long but in future, I'll keep it mostly short and snappy.