// About the Ancient Geek
Forty years
of receipts.
I am not a thought leader. I am the bloke who has watched this industry reinvent itself four times and outlive every consultant who told me the last reinvention was the final one. The fifth one is happening right now. WordPress is not surviving it. This site is the field report.
Most “about” pages are a CV in cosplay. This one is a confession. I have spent more of my working life inside the stack you are reading this on than most of its loudest defenders have been alive. I helped build the input devices the modern web takes for granted. I built classified systems for two defence ministries. I ran a $50M sales number for Xerox. I founded an agency in 2008 and shipped sixty-three WordPress sites before I admitted, in writing, that the platform was finished.
That admission is the only thing on this page that matters. The rest is just how I got the right to say it out loud.
The receipts.
- 01
Xerox Advanced Systems hardware engineer. Worked on the mouse, the trackpad, the icon-based desktop — the stuff your operating system still copies forty years later.
- 02
Xerox PARC, Palo Alto. Shared burritos and beanbags with the people whose names you put on slide decks. Watched a billion-dollar industry get invented in a single building.
- 03
Classified document management for the US Department of Defense and the UK Ministry of Defence. The kind of project you don't put on LinkedIn.
- 04
Xerox Business Services in the 90s — compressing a library onto a ruggedised laptop before anyone had heard of "the cloud."
- 05
Xerox Services Marketing Manager. $50M target. Five days a week on a plane. Burned out like a supernova. Quit.
- 06
2000s document consultancy. Saved Fortune 500s eight figures by deleting their paper. Tools we built are still running in their server rooms.
- 07
2008: founded Grass Media Web Design. Built 63 client sites in Elementor. Made a living. Made a habit. Made a mistake.
- 08
2026: writing the autopsy on the platform that paid my mortgage for seventeen years.
// The unvarnished bit
Left school at fifteen.
No degree.
No regrets.
I walked out of school at fifteen with a minor qualification in catering and an instinct that the rest of my life was not going to be measured in shop shifts. Enrolled part-time at the local tech college. Found out I was wired for electronics the way some people are wired for music. Earned credentials in digital electronics, audio engineering, and power amplification.
Spent a stretch tuning and repairing Hammond organs for touring bands — one of three engineers in the UK who could. Lovely work. Did not pay the bills.
Bluffed my way into Xerox as a hardware engineer with “keyboard experience.” They assumed I meant the ones with letters on. By the time anyone checked, I was already useful. Xerox paid for my qualifications in business administration, sales, and marketing. I owe them the vocabulary. I do not owe them my future.
I have started two businesses from a blank page. I have killed one of them on purpose. I am in the process of killing the second on purpose, too — because the market it serves is dying and I would rather lead the wake than attend it.
What I’m actually good at.
// No buzzwords. No certifications. Just things that have worked, repeatedly, with money on the line.
- →Making incompatible hardware speak to each other when the vendors swore it was impossible.
- →Fixing the thing the last consultant broke and the current consultant is hiding.
- →Building businesses from a blank page and a phone line, twice.
- →Reading a P&L the way most developers read a stack trace.
- →Selling services to people who don't want to buy services. Sun Tzu with a spreadsheet.
- →Decoding why your visitors leave the form on field three. (It's never field three.)
- →Training salespeople, marketers, engineers, and the occasional CEO. Without slides.
- →Calling time of death on a stack before the client has to.
So why this site?
Because nobody else in my generation of the industry will say it. They have mortgages tied to retainer revenue. They have staff. They have plugin licenses that auto-renewed last week. They have a version of themselves, circa 2014, that they are still trying to be loyal to.
I have all of that too. I am writing anyway. The next 24 months are going to take the WordPress economy apart in public. I would rather be the one with the scalpel than the one on the table.
“I am not anti-WordPress. I am pro-survival. The two used to overlap. They don’t anymore.”
If you run an agency, freelance, or hold a CMS license you are starting to feel weird about — read the autopsies, take the memo, argue with me in your head, then act before your competitors do. That is the entire purpose of this place.
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