I’ve spent thirty years in IT. Not climbing a ladder, more like finding my way through a building where nobody gave me the map.
I’m neurodivergent. AUDHD. Took me until my 50s to understand why certain things that came easily to everyone else felt like swimming through concrete, and why the things nobody else could focus on for five minutes could hold me for twelve hours straight. Decades of making it work without knowing how I was making it work.
The corporate world is fine with that, mostly. As long as you deliver. As long as the edges stay filed.
I’m still in it. Senior infrastructure engineer, serious cert stack, the kind of environment where the security requirements are not suggestions. I’m not walking away from any of it. But something shifted a while back, quietly, then all at once, and I started building something else alongside it.
It started with a moment I couldn’t shake.
I was mid-conversation with an AI tool I’d been using daily for months. Thinking out loud, working through a problem, the kind of conversation where something actually clicks. And then it asked me to introduce myself.
Thousands of words. Hours of thinking. Gone. Just another session. Ticket closed.
I sat with that for a while. These tools aren’t built for people like me. They’re built for engagement metrics and scale. The help is real but it’s incidental. What they’re actually optimising for is something else entirely.
So I started pulling a different thread.
Local infrastructure. Privacy-first. AI that runs on my hardware, under my control, with no subscription that can quietly change what it is overnight. Tools built around how I actually think, not how the product team assumed I would.
What followed was a rabbit hole. Then another. Then several simultaneously, which is honestly just how this goes.
Every build decision opened a door. Every door opened three more. Some of them led somewhere useful. Some of them led to 2am and a cluster of Raspberry Pis doing something nobody asked them to do. All of it felt worth documenting.
This is where I do that.
I call it The Midnight Library. Not a blog, not a brand. A space where the threads live. Where every rabbit hole gets its own shelf. Where the choices branch and the possibilities stay open.
And yes, I did write this with my AI. Not because I can’t write, because I write better with it. It sharpens the words. Pushes back when I spiral. Cuts the fluff I don’t notice. That’s the point. A thinking environment built around how I work, not how someone else decided I should.
The technical detail is here if you want it. The philosophy sits underneath if that’s what you came for. Mostly it’s just honest documentation of someone building something real, finding out what works, and sharing it without the performance.
Just a bloke in his 50s, tired of noise, building something honest.
If that sounds interesting, pull up a chair.