All About Richard

I build things. That's the short version.

The slightly longer version is that I'm the lead developer at Richah — the person Sarah and Jack come to when something has gone technically wrong in a way that nobody can immediately explain, which, in software, is most of the interesting problems.

I've been writing software for over twenty-five years, entirely self-taught. I mention the "entirely" deliberately, because it changes how you think. Nobody handed me a degree or a prescribed stack. I learned by doing, by breaking things, and by reading documentation at unreasonable hours until I understood why something worked — not just that it did. The practical consequence of that is I've never been particularly attached to any one language or framework. A problem arrives, I learn whatever I need to learn, and I build something that solves it. That's been the approach since 1999 and it hasn't let me down yet.

At Richah, my job is to make sure we build things that hold up. Not prototypes that dazzle in a demo and fall over under real load — actual, resilient software that does what it promised, every time, for years. That's a harder standard than most people realise, and it's the one I hold myself to.

How I got here

My career started in earnest in 1999 at Nottingham City Transport. I was handed a rather ambitious brief: build the back-office infrastructure for their smart card transit system. I taught myself VB6 and SQL — the tools of the moment — and got on with it.

What I didn't quite appreciate at the time was the scale of what we were actually building. That system, which I eventually extended to serve the local Council as well, went on to become the second-largest smart card transit system in the UK. The only one bigger was London's Oyster card. It's a strange thing to reflect on — that the first serious piece of software I ever built turned out to be one of the most consequential things I'd ever work on. I've spent the years since quietly hoping that's not true, and building accordingly.

From there I moved steadily through the Microsoft ecosystem — ASP.NET, C#, Windows Forms, eventually Blazor — picking up each new chapter as it arrived. I didn't chase trends. I learned what was needed, built what was in front of me, and moved on when something better came along.

In 2011 I went freelance and started what eventually became The Card Project UK Ltd. Sarah joined later, immediately understood the business better than I did, and has been running it ever since. I write the software. She runs everything else. It's an arrangement that suits us both.

What I'm building now

Here's where it gets a little difficult to explain at a dinner party.

Alongside Richah, I work full-time as a developer for a large multi-state corporation based in Missouri, USA. My day tends to involve programming PLCs and Keyence devices for industrial automation at one end, and building AI-driven web applications in Next.js at the other. Sometimes both before lunch.

I mention this not to pad out a biography but because it's actually relevant. Working at that breadth — real hardware, genuine enterprise constraints, production-grade web development — gives you a particular view of what software is capable of and what it genuinely needs to be able to withstand. The AI tools we build at Richah aren't weekend experiments or proof-of-concept side projects. They're built by someone who ships production software every single day and has done for over two decades.

The ambition at Richah is straightforward: take that experience, apply it to problems that actually matter to businesses, and build tools that are robust enough to be trusted. That's what I'm working on.

Out on the fells (against my better judgement)

When I'm not in front of a screen, I run. Mostly road running, which I've done for years — it's straightforward, requires very little equipment, and gives me enough time alone with my thoughts to solve most problems that weren't actually solved at the desk.

Recently, however, I've been talked into fell running. This is largely Jack's fault. Jack is our Creative Developer at Richah, he is thirty years younger than me, and he is — and I say this with the specific resentment of someone who has just been left behind on a hill — extraordinarily fit. The fell running was his idea. I agreed, presumably in a moment of misplaced confidence, and I have been paying for it ever since.

I'll say this for it: the Lake District has a way of making even a brutal run feel worth the effort. The views are genuinely ridiculous, the air is clean, and there's something to be said for a hobby that empties your head completely. I'll probably keep doing it. I just won't be keeping up with Jack any time soon.