Hi, I'm Laurence.
I build mobile apps, web tools and data projects.
Nine apps shipped on iOS and Android so far.
Apps
All 9 apps
Projects
Open source
River Watch
Tracks the health of England's rivers using open Environment Agency data, so anyone can see what is happening to their local waterways.
Website
Cloud Point Field Guide
A field guide to clouds that starts from what you actually saw. Fifty-two photographed entries in plain English, ordered by altitude.
Twitter bot
Rock of the Day
Posts a mystery rock photo every day, challenges followers to identify it, then reveals the answer. A fun way to learn geology.
Writing
All posts
93 Million Tokens, One Very Bad Afternoon
How a leaked API key burned through $91.60 of OpenAI credits in about 10 minutes.
The Quest for England's River Health Data: A Developer's Odyssey
How I spent an Easter weekend downloading 25 years of water quality data one API call at a time — because the government deleted the download button.
Someone Tried to Bankrupt My Cloud App With Broken Images and Bad Intentions
How a rogue user called TheBug0502 sent my Google Cloud bill into the stratosphere — and what I learned about protecting a Firebase backend the hard way.
About
I'm a mobile developer and data scientist based in the UK. I trained in geophysics, worked in data science at BT Group, then left to build 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, and occasionally write about what I've learned. I care about clean code, real user value and shipping things that actually work.