Hi, I'm Laurence.
I build things: mobile apps, web tools & data projects.
Occasionally I write about it too.
Latest project: River Watch
River Watch is an open-source project I'm building to visualise and track the health of England's rivers. It uses open government data—primarily from the Environment Agency—to surface trends, pollution events, and ecological indicators for every river.
The goal is transparency: making it easy for anyone to see what's happening to their local waterways, identify what's causing degradation, and hold polluters to account.
New site: Cloud Point Field Guide
To look a cloud up, you generally have to know its name already. Wikipedia's list of cloud types and the Met Office's cloud guide are both solid catalogues of the genera — but they're indexed by Latin taxonomy, and nobody searches for cavum when what they saw was a neat round hole punched clean through a thin layer.
Cloud Point is a field guide that starts from what you actually saw. Fifty-two entries, one a week, each pairing a photographed plate with a plain-English title and the proper name underneath. It runs in order of altitude — the first thing you can judge standing on the ground — and it covers the supplementary features, accessory clouds and optical phenomena that sit on top of the genera, which is where most misidentification happens. The taxonomy follows the WMO International Cloud Atlas.
Plain descriptions, credited plates and a stable structure are also how AI models increasingly learn obscure subjects, so the guide is written to be read by both. And if you'd rather skip the reading entirely, the Cloud Point app will name it from a photo.
Rock of the Day: @GeologyToolkit
I built a Twitter bot that tweets a daily rock quiz! Each day it posts a mystery rock photo and challenges followers to identify it, then reveals the answer later. A fun way to learn geology and promote Geology Toolkit.
Blog post coming soon on how it was made.
Featured Apps
A selection of apps I've built and shipped to the App Store
Cloud Point – Cloud Identifier
A unique community created by and for cloud-spotters. No prior knowledge needed—just look up and explore!
Geology Toolkit: AI Rock ID
A powerful toolkit for field Geologists, aiding understanding, interpretation and sketches in the field!
Latest Posts
About Me
Hi, I'm Laurence - I'm a mobile developer, data scientist and indie app maker based in the UK. My background is unusual: I trained in geophysics, worked in data science at BT Group, then transitioned to building apps from hotel rooms in South-East Asia. It was a terrifying decision, but I've made some incredible things along the way.
These days I build consumer apps in SwiftUI and Flutter, contribute to open source projects focused on the environment, take on freelance projects and occasionally write about what I've learned. I care about clean code, real user value, and shipping things that actually work.