From local-business websites to global AI platforms.

If you'd rather watch than read.

A quick hello — who I am, how I think about this, and what I write about. No sign-up needed.

It started with local businesses.

In my teens I built websites for local businesses. Not for the love of the craft — for the money. I didn't come from a privileged background, and building sites was a way to earn that didn't need capital, connections, or anyone's permission. It turned out to be the best coding education I never knew I was getting.

Then law — and a job I didn't know existed.

After my law degree I joined a global law firm, where I got the chance to join the dots between the coding I'd taught myself and the legal world: automating documents as a legal engineer. My job was automating the quick wins lawyers do — and I soon noticed I enjoyed that more than the law itself.

I'd have loved being a lawyer. But being in a position where I didn't have to chase billable hours — working in a world that was actively reducing the need for them — was more appealing. That was the moment the plan changed.

I learned on a platform with no manual.

The platform we used was proprietary: no user guide, no documentation, no Stack Overflow answers waiting. Just the generic resources for the programming languages underneath it. So I learned the only way available — by doing, and then by teaching my own team so we could scale.

Teaching turned out to be the trick. Every time I coached someone through the platform, I understood it better myself. That lesson stuck.

Twenty students, three countries, 40 minutes a week.

In the 2020 lockdown I put a message out to my network: I'd teach small coding classes for free, 40 minutes a week — 40 because that's where the free Zoom plan cut off. The response was bigger than I expected. People asked to bring a friend, and their friends brought friends.

That weekend I ran three classes spanning Singapore, India and the UK, for twenty students. Every one of them ended up writing and running real Python. Seneca said "when we teach, we learn" — psychologists call it the Protégé Effect — and those students proved it on me: their questions taught me as much as my lessons taught them. Code with Pav grew out of those classes.

Today I lead global tech & AI platforms.

These days I lead global technology, AI platforms and engineering in highly regulated markets — the kind of environment where software has to be right, data is sensitive, and "it seems to work" doesn't cut it. That discipline runs through everything I write here.

I still build things myself — partly because I enjoy it, and partly because it's hard to write honestly about coding if you've stopped doing it. GoToday is the current one: a small weather-and-itinerary app that's live if you want to have a go.

A secret about experts.

Here's something I've learned working alongside them: experts don't know everything — they're just good at presenting themselves as if they do. And that's not necessarily bad; they're buying time to figure it out. The figuring-out part is a skill, and it's the one I actually teach.

So if you came into this sideways, or you're quietly convinced the technical side is for other people — that was me. If a law grad who built websites for local businesses can end up leading technology around the globe, there's more room to move than it looks. That's most of what I write about here.

— Pav