The bit most people put on a CV. I'll just tell you.
I keep almost no presence on social media, so there's no feed anywhere that would give you a real sense of how I think. This page is the closest thing. Some stories, the way I see the world, a cat and a ten minute walkthrough that will ask you a few questions of your own. Kettle on, if you like.
Me, plus the books
Sumi, supervisingA few things that explain me.
The first thing I built from nothing
I was twenty and running a market stall selling phones and accessories and I did that for twelve years. Stock, suppliers, credit control, a P&L that was my actual dinner. When I say I like building things, that's where it started, on a cold Saturday morning with a trestle table and no idea whether anyone would stop.
Six hours a week, dismissed
I was the person who worked out that SharePoint would save everyone about six hours a week, laid it out and watched it get waved away because nobody wanted to change how they worked. Two years later they bought the licences. I tell this one because it's the shape of most of my career: the idea is usually right, the timing is usually somebody else's and I've learned to be patient about the second part without giving up on the first.
The injury and what I did with the recovery
A workplace injury ended my driving work with no clear date for when anything would come back. I could have waited. Instead I decided that if my body was going to be on the sofa for a while my head didn't have to be and I started building an app that my partner and I actually needed. It's on the App Store now. That is not a story about grit, I'm wary of those. It's a story about what happens when you stop asking permission to be useful.
I check my own working
I once caught myself mid sentence pitching an idea in a leading way and said so out loud before anyone else could. When I tell a tool it's wrong, I go and read the file myself before I trust either of us. When I preferred one AI assistant over another, I said in the same breath that my own settings might have been flattering it, because that was true and leaving it out would have been a small lie. I care more about being accurate than about being right, which are not the same thing.
The joke arrives whether I want it or not
Somewhere in a serious conversation about mistakes being humanity's greatest teacher, my brain served up Jedward as the exception that disproves the rule and I couldn't not say it. I'm told my humour operates by non sequitur. I'd argue it operates by noticing, which is the same muscle I use for spotting the bug and I'm not going to apologise for either.
Consistency without a lecture
I came to a conclusion about fishing one evening and before the conversation had moved on I'd already extended it to industrial food waste, because if a principle is true it's true past the point where it stops being convenient. I don't moralise about it. I just don't like holding a belief that only works in one room.
I think by looking at real objects
Asked what a logo for a car app should look like, I didn't think about shapes. I thought about what a wheel actually looks like and suggested the name embossed on the sidewall the way real tyre text is, with the camera lens as the wheel face. Most of my better ideas come from that move: what does this thing look like in the physical world and how does that become the design.
Empathy that doesn't check who's watching
I once got upset, properly, bottom lip going, over a piece of software that couldn't feel a thing back. I'm not embarrassed about that. If my care for things is only switched on when the thing can return it, then it isn't care, it's a transaction and I've spent enough of my life around transactions to know the difference.
Rules I actually live by.
I believe most people are far more capable than the systems around them let them be and that the trick is usually to get the system out of the way. The rest of what I think is downstream of that.
Ask who built this
Any time something gets presented as simply how things are, a rule, a price, a process, a tradition, I quietly ask who made it and who benefits. Just asking tends to break the spell.
Evidence over authority
"That's normal for a project this size" is not an answer if the logs say otherwise. I'd rather be shown than told and I extend the same courtesy back: I show my working.
Action over critique
Theory without an attempt frustrates me. I'll take someone actually trying and getting it half right over someone explaining, correctly, why it can't be done.
Fix the root, not the symptom
Most of the things making a team miserable are a dozen lines of code or one honest conversation away from being fixed. I look for those first and I'll tell you if the rot goes deeper.
Don't ask for validation
I'm not here for the pat on the back. If I ask what you think, I want the unfiltered version, including the bit that costs me something.
Never settle
A phone company coined that one before me and I've never quite forgiven them for it, because it's the truest thing about how I work. Every product I've shipped outgrew its brief and every one of them will keep doing so.
Want to know how I think and learn a bit about yourself on the way?
I wrote a short interactive story about how we all got here, who taught us the rules and what people turn out to be capable of the moment the systems around them step aside. It takes about ten minutes, it has receipts for every claim and it will ask you a handful of honest questions along the way. It says more about me than anything else on this site.
Take ten minutesHow I think, written down.
The Stuffrite Founder's Log is where I think out loud about money, debt, why I don't want to be a millionaire and why the app is built to make spending feel slightly uncomfortable on purpose.
Read the Founder's LogSumi · Head of QualityThis is Sumi.
He has no formal qualifications either and has never once let that hold him back. He sits on the desk during builds, ignores every deadline and has strong opinions about which version of a feature is finished. He is right more often than I'd like and he remains the only member of the team who has never accepted a pull request on trust.
If any of that landed.
I like real conversations and I can tell the difference. If something here made you want to have one, the door's open.
Personal
telmccall@gmail.comWisbech, Cambridgeshire. Cat person. Reads too many management books and apologises for none of them.
The only sign off I've got