About This Site

This is my site. I built it to try and hold myself accountable for two things I've been failing at for way too long:

• Managing my finances like an adult.
• Actually learning and improving as a developer instead of coasting.

It's not meant to be polished or professional. It's just me putting things out there so I can't ignore them anymore. As well as this I'll be completely transparent, with proof, to back up all my financial posts, something which I haven’t personally seen online before. Maybe it will even help some people in similar situations. The tech side of things? Speaks for itself at the moment... I'll be deploying this site live once I get my first 'post' up and it'll remain in development with all the incomplete parts until I finish them.

A Bit About Me

I'm in my early thirties. I work full time in the UK as a "software developer" on a salary somewhere between £40–50k. Why is that relevant? Because in the UK, £40–50k is a decent salary — more than enough to live on comfortably if you're not a complete idiot with it. And because software developer usually means someone who's smart, logical, and good at problem solving. I tick both boxes on paper... but in reality, I'm neither of those things right now.

Where I'm At Financially

At the time of writing, I've got £30k+ in bad debt (credit cards, loans, store accounts). Most of it has defaulted and been handed off to debt collection agencies. Month after month, I run out of money 10–15 days before payday. I have zero savings. My monthly take-home pay (around £2,600 after tax and pension) should be enough to live relatively comfortably and still chip away at debt. The fact that I'm not doing that is down to two things: a bad attitude toward money in my teens and twenties through till now, and the main culprit: a gambling addiction that has wrecked my finances more than anything else. I know it's avoidable. I know it's my fault. But knowing and fixing are two different things.

Where I'm At With My Career

I got lucky breaking into software. I didn't try particularly hard at uni. I didn't push myself in my role. Once I learned the company's BAU procedures and how they did things, I coasted. I stopped learning, stopped challenging myself, and started leaning too heavily on AI tools. Don't get me wrong — I think AI is fantastic. But here's how it usually goes:

New task: "We need a data pipeline to process these figures for the month."
Me: Copy / paste the entire task description into ChatGPT and hope for the best.

That habit has killed my ability to solve problems myself. Outside my day-to-day work, I feel like I can't build anything. I'm constantly battling the question: Is AI helping me by making me more efficient? Or is it making me fall behind because I'm skipping the actual learning? Right now, it feels like the latter. And that's a problem. Here's an example — that little block quote above? I used VSCode's Copilot to produce it in terms of design... I didn’t know about the <blockquote /> syntax, I just knew I wanted it to look like that. Is that an issue?

Why "2 Steps Backwards"?

That saying "...1 step forwards, 2 steps backwards" — that's how it feels. The only issue being I'm not even getting a step forward, just back financially, professionally, personally. This blog is me trying to stop that. It's not about polished stories or fake success. In fact, it'll likely just be entire posts of failure. It's about writing things down, owning up to them, and (hopefully) starting to see some actual progress.