I’m COO at Scotty AI, a European platform for AI agents. Before that I was freelance CIO, including at War Child, and IT director at Greenpeace International and G-Star.
What I do in my job, I also do at home: organizing, structuring, and reorganizing processes. Nowadays with AI. I build it myself before I give it to someone else, because I learn something from it and I like it, it’s fun. And that gets me an energy report that’s ready every morning at seven o’clock, ten years of health data that I can finally read, a recipe collection that organizes itself, and three novels.
Here I write about the projects I do, how I went about them, which mistakes I made, and sometimes what I would do differently. Sometimes I show the results, and sometimes it’s just the story.
A fault in the power grid, and everything that follows happens exactly as it was designed to. No villain, nobody who made a mistake. What is left is a handful of people who have to explain a crisis that no one caused.
Approaches
Ten apps for one house, and none of them did what I wanted. With AI, Home Assistant turned out to be a different thing: I decide how it should work and look, and the technical work is no longer mine.
I now dictate a large part of my work instead of typing it, three to four times faster. Not with one of the paid apps that promise exactly that, but with a cloud cleaning setup of my own, tested to get right.
From an expensive site that made every change a chore to a free and flexible one I keep up with AI: a few keywords in a chat, a piece of writing back, one approval, and it is online.
From scenario exploration to a first draft of 20,000 words, then fourteen rounds of deepening to 70,000. What happened in each round, and why the book fell apart into 25 separate files along the way.
Home Assistant measures, a scheduled task does the arithmetic, and I read on my phone what happened yesterday. Savings, small fixes and investments with a payback period, kept apart.
One script with no external packages, on a Synology running Python 3.8, that reduces a ten-year export to 96 daily values per day.
Ideas
An oversight body for AI, modelled on the one aviation has, and the published model weights that fall outside its mandate.
Out of Apple Notes and into a container on the NAS, with a hook so a new recipe goes straight in.
The recipes I already have, out of Apple Notes and into one book, with the photos from the Instagram archive.
Twenty-four connections out of a closed test network, and a report that nobody read. Then a shutdown sector by sector, and an order that nobody withdraws.
Secondhand IKEA Symfonisk internals into a Braun SK1 from 1955.
Measuring what the boat uses the way the house already does.
Fibre into a KPN box, then Google Wifi in NAT mode, so everything at home sits behind two layers of NAT. One router too many.
Updates
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