I'm Thomas Watson, a UK-based software engineer with 12 years building production systems. I've delivered across insurance, eCommerce and fintech — a greenfield microservices platform at Covéa, re-architecting Pimberly's eCommerce platform so each client scaled independently, the payments and discounts engine inside a high-traffic beauty retailer, real-time 3D tours of the EU Parliament in 24 languages, and the AI layer of an energy platform to GDPR standards. That's the engineering. What's changed is the pace: AI-assisted development now absorbs the volume of work that used to need a whole team, so I ship platforms in days that agencies quote in months — a full community trading platform, live within days of starting, serving 5,000 visitors a day in its first week. Enterprise-grade capability, startup speed, small-business pricing.
12 yrs
building production software
9
featured projects — insurance to AI
Days
from brief to live, not months
Why the speed is real
I spent years working inside agencies and on big enterprise projects — cloud platforms, AI systems, and software for blue-chip teams. It taught me how to build things that are reliable, secure, and maintainable, not just things that demo well.
It also showed me where the time and money actually go in a traditional build: coordination, hand-offs between specialists, and hand-writing the same plumbing on every project. Very little of an agency's quarter is spent on the hard, valuable thinking — most of it is volume and overhead.
That volume is exactly what AI-assisted development removes. I build with AI tooling deep in the process, under senior review at every step, so the architecture, security model and edge cases get my full attention while the repetitive work compresses into hours. The result is a genuine step change in output: full platforms — accounts, databases, payments, live data feeds — going live within days of starting, at a fraction of what the same scope costs elsewhere, and built to standards that held up in insurance and banking.
It means the things that were never worth building before, because an agency quote made them impossible, are now well within reach. Bring me the awkward, specific problem nobody would take on.
Principles
Shipping in days isn't rushing — it's removing the waste. AI-assisted development handles the volume; 12 years of experience decides the architecture, security and edge cases. You get the same standards I applied to insurance and banking systems, delivered on a timescale that actually helps your business.
If your idea is simpler than you think, I'll say so. If it's outside what I do well, I'll tell you and point you somewhere better. I'd rather lose a project than sell you the wrong thing.
I build software you understand and control, with the details written down — not a black box only I can touch. If we ever stop working together, you're not stranded.
You don't care whether it's built in C# or TypeScript — you care that bookings come in, admin disappears, and the thing doesn't break. I lead with what changes for your business, and keep the tech under the hood where it belongs.
Thirty minutes to understand what you're trying to do — then an honest answer on what it takes and how fast it can be live. No sales pitch, no obligation.
No deck. No drip campaign. One reply.
