How I got here.

For a long time I couldn't have told you what I did for a living, because it kept changing. I trained as an electro-engineer in the Czech Republic, spent years chasing photography, ran a business, went self-employed. From the outside it probably looked like I couldn't settle. It felt more like I was circling something I hadn't named yet.

Photography was the thread I kept coming back to; I picked up a camera young and never really put it down. But it was never the whole picture. Somewhere in there I opened a coffee shop, and running it taught me more than any classroom: how a business actually works behind the counter, the ordering, the rotas, the small systems that keep the doors open. That's the part my head latched onto.

Then I moved to Scotland for the work. I couldn't speak a word of English when I landed. I'd been learning German, half-expecting to end up there, and picked Scotland instead, so I spent my first couple of years in restaurant kitchens while the language caught up.

Once it had, I went back to studying. Travel and tourism first: the idea was to take the photography out into the world and get paid to travel with it, and for a while I did travel a lot. Then an HNC and HND in photography at Fife College, and finally a degree in Creative Enterprise at Queen Margaret University, which I finished with distinction in July 2024. That last one is where DaVinci Enterprise began, a small studio that has grown steadily ever since.

Around the same time, food manufacturing got its hooks into me. I started on the floor as a hygiene operative and, inside a year, worked up through hygiene controller and team manager to assistant hygiene manager. It quietly changed my mind. The travel-the-world idea had started to feel more like a holiday than a job; the factory was the opposite, full of things that genuinely needed fixing, none of them needing a plane ticket. That's when it clicked. The thing was never the subject. Photography, engineering, a coffee shop, the factory floor: every one was really the same job. Take something messy and give it a shape people can use, and fixing the broken bits turned out to be what I'm best at.

That's the pattern in most of what I do. I'm at my best when there's too much going on and not enough order, and oddly restless when everything's already tidy. My head needs something to build. It's also why I keep finding the wiring between subjects that look unrelated: engineering and biology, psychology and the old belief systems, philosophy and code. To me a mitochondrion is just a very good capacitor. Same idea, a few billion years apart.

When AI turned up, most people reached for it to write emails. I got curious about the joins: how to wire these tools together and get them doing work nobody had thought to ask for yet. A lot of what I build now started there.

Underneath all of it is something plain. I like solving problems. Some people get their kick from a run or a bar of chocolate; I get mine from taking a knot a team has been staring at for years and pulling it apart. If that also turns into work for DaVinci, so much the better, but the puzzle is most of the reward.

So that's the honest version: not a straight line, but every turn pointing the same way. If you've got the kind of problem that keeps a team up at night, it's probably the kind I'd enjoy.