2023–2026 — The Visionary

Where experience
meets the future.

48 years of building things converge. Greenfield architecture. Agentic AI. A team of 12. And the realisation that the best engineers don't just write code — they shape products.

Thrive by Blackfinch

In June 2023, I began working with Blackfinch, the Engineering Manager pondered over which project I should work on, I said "give me the failing one". By April 2024, I was the hands-on technical lead for Thrive — a greenfield platform delivering workplace pensions, employee benefits, financial coaching, and personal investment products to employees through SMEs.

I took a simple system architecture document and eventually turned it into a 105-project solution — a sliced WebAPI-fronted CQRS and Mediatr patterned domain-driven system with an onion architecture structure.

Core Architecture

  • Domain-Driven Design with onion structure
  • CQRS + Mediatr pattern
  • Sliced WebAPI frontage
  • Microservices approach

Frontend & Mobile

  • External apps: React (migrated from Blazor)
  • Mobile: Ionic (evolved from MAUI → React Native)
  • Internal systems: Blazor Server

Infrastructure

  • .NET 10.0 / C#
  • Azure (ServiceBus, App Insights, Keyvault, etc)
  • MongoDB, Redis
  • Docker, Microsoft Aspire
  • Yarp, Dapr

Practices

  • Diagrams & docs as code (Mermaid + Markdown)
  • OpenAPI/Swagger
  • Automated testing at scale
  • Agile with startup mentality

The Agentic Evolution

As AI developed rapidly during my time at Blackfinch, I didn't just adopt it — the team and I architected its integration into our development workflow.

01

Agent Mode

Started with AI-assisted coding through VS 2022/2026 and VS Code agent mode — accelerating individual output.

02

The Agent Foundry

Team-created specialist AI agents — purpose-built to define backlog items (epics, features, stories, tasks), follow architecture patterns, and conduct code reviews.

03

Product Engineer

With AI handling specific technical and organisational tasks, my role evolved. The title didn't change, but the mindset shifted — from developer to product engineer, leveraging decades of experience with end-user customers to drive broader success.

More than code

Team of 12

Junior, Mid and Senior Engineers plus QA — built up, onboarded, mentored, and guided through a greenfield product launch.

Startup within an enterprise

We ran Thrive as a startup — fluid ideas, changing requirements, unfinished stories, rapid pivots. Then hardened it with automated testing when the ideas had solidified.

Line management

Interviews, 2-weekly 1:1s, objectives, performance reviews, expense authorisation, process improvement. The full spectrum of people leadership.

Agile mindset

Not ceremony-driven agile — real agility. The kind where you adapt the process to the situation, not the other way round.

Lessons Learned

Challenge the business

Many achitectural decisions were based on business plans, it turned out that those plans were overly optimistic. The modular monolith and more 3rd party solutions look better with hindsight.

More transparency

Spanning one year we had numerous go-live deadlines and engineering was on-time for each of them but the business was not, we could have planned some things better with more transparency.

No chasing rainbows

Opportunities were presented, if we had this feature then this customer will come onboard - they didn't.

"The most valuable thing 48 years has given me isn't technical skill — it's the ability to see through the technology to the problem that actually needs solving. AI amplifies that. It doesn't replace it."

Key takeaway

The future doesn't belong to developers who fear AI. It belongs to those who know how to direct it — with the context that only decades of real-world experience can provide. Technology is the tool. Vision is the differentiator.