Hobbies

When I'm not at work I'm usually still building something — just with different tools and for different reasons. Here's a deeper look at the things I spend my time on.

Speedrunning Minecraft Ranked

Competitive Minecraft speedrunning is a mix of routing optimisation, RNG manipulation, and raw mechanical skill. In Ranked mode you get dropped into a random seed and race against the clock (and other players) to beat the game as fast as possible. Every run is a puzzle — reading the terrain, deciding which trades to make with villagers, routing the Nether, and executing the dragon fight cleanly. It's the closest thing to competitive programming but inside a game engine.

Building AI Tools

Most of my side projects start the same way: "I wonder if I can automate this." That question has led to platforms like BusinessFlowAI (PDF → flowchart), SuggestSongs (AI song recommendations), and Influstrat (influencer–advertiser matching). The common thread is taking a messy real-world problem and throwing LLMs, embeddings, or classical ML at it until it works — then wrapping it in a clean UI so non-technical people can use it too.

Electronics & Tinkering

From building radios to soldering custom PCBs, electronics has been a constant hobby. There's something satisfying about working at the hardware level — debugging a circuit with a multimeter, reading datasheets, and getting an LED to blink for the first time on a new board. It's the physical counterpart to writing software: same debugging mindset, different medium.

Content Creation Automation

I'm fascinated by the pipeline behind content creation — not just making videos, but automating the entire workflow. Script generation, text-to-speech, video editing, thumbnail creation, scheduling, analytics — every step can be partially or fully automated. The ScorchAI channel was the proving ground for this: a fully AI-automated YouTube channel that hit 12M+ views. Now I focus on building tools that help other creators scale their workflows without burning out.

Airsoft

Airsoft is the perfect offline reset — tactical team-based gameplay, equipment loadout planning, and outdoor terrain. It's a hobby that has nothing to do with screens and everything to do with situational awareness, communication, and adrenaline. Also a great excuse to tinker with gear modifications and radio setups.

3D CAD Design

I design parts and enclosures in CAD for both practical and experimental purposes. Whether it's a custom mount for electronics, a replacement part that's impossible to buy, or a concept prototype for a project idea — CAD lets me go from napkin sketch to precise 3D model in a few hours. The design-iterate-print loop is incredibly tight and rewarding.

3D Printing (Anycubic Kobra S1)

My Anycubic Kobra S1 is probably one of the most-used machines I own. Once you have a printer, you start seeing printable solutions everywhere — cable management clips, sensor housings, desk organizers, prototype enclosures, custom adapters. The Kobra S1's auto-levelling and direct drive extruder make it reliable enough to hit print and walk away, which means I iterate fast and often.

High-Tech Experimentation

"High-tech stuff" is the catch-all for everything that doesn't fit neatly into another category — experimenting with new sensors, building IoT setups with MQTT, testing edge computing hardware, playing with SDR (software-defined radio), or just taking apart a device to understand how it works. The goal is always the same: understand the technology deeply enough to build something useful with it.

Intelligence Automation

One of the more niche areas I work on is automating intelligence ingestion — building systems that collect, process, and structure open-source intelligence (OSINT) and other data streams for analytical use. This involves scraping, NLP, entity extraction, relationship mapping, and presenting structured intelligence feeds. The challenge is scale and signal-to-noise ratio: how do you turn a firehose of raw information into actionable insight without human bottlenecks?

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