From a BBC Micro in the 1980s to security, tooling and analytics.
I started programming at five on a BBC Micro — BASIC first, then 6502 assembly. I moved through the Amiga years and into the PC world, always building rather than consuming.
Professionally since 1997, beginning in Delphi. My first application shipped on the cover disc of a UK PC magazine in 1998; a second followed in 2001. Since then: pharmacy software, hosting infrastructure, school management systems, a bespoke Asterisk platform, agency work, and engineering at Cisco in PHP, Rust and Go.
I was placed second in an international coding innovation competition in 2013, developed middleware that let people control a paintball gun over the internet from a Spanish shopping centre, and built systems where the reliability bar is high and the margin for error is narrow. Around this, I develop my own software and have a very keen interest in security and cyrptography.
Time-series data, analytics and observability
VictoriaMetrics · Prometheus · Grafana
Working style: practical, direct, careful. Unglamorous problems taken seriously. Complexity added only where simplicity genuinely will not do.
29 years of professional experienceData Analysis System
A private spreadsheet-analysis workbench: CSV and Excel in, detector recommendations, highlighted anomalies, explainable scores and clean exports out.
Read more →Fury
A post-quantum-only file encryption tool: FrodoKEM-640 plus ML-KEM-768, mandatory encrypted identities, fingerprints and cross-platform binaries.
Read more →BlackWall
A WebAuthn-only OAuth 2.1 and OIDC server: PKCE, multi-tenant architecture, audit logging, introspection, revocation, rate limiting and a user portal.
Visit BlackWall →Leviathan
A binary-analysis and forensics workbench in the browser. Hex editing, entropy, carving, ciphers, YARA-like rules — over twenty tools, no upload.
Read more →NeoCMS
A database-free CMS for static sites that still need proper editing. It adds visual editing to what you already have, without the usual weight.
Learn more →Basilisk
A self-contained, OpenAI-compatible LLM server in a single Docker container — CPU or GPU inference, kept entirely in-house.
Read more →Nexus Terminal
A cross-platform SSH, Telnet, raw TCP and GitHub client with an encrypted vault, tabs, split panes and a command palette. For people who live in the terminal.
Read more →Squish
A Go web app and JSON API that compresses prompts before they reach an LLM — a deterministic four-stage pipeline that cuts token count and cost with no inference and no network calls.
Read more →Metrics & Observability
VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, custom collectors and statistical analysis — for teams that need more than a dashboard.
See the work →Cipher Workbench
Cipher Workbench reads the input, runs broad-spectrum and focused attacks against classical ciphers, XOR, and encoded challenge payloads — then promotes the strongest candidate. No upload, no server round-trips.
Try it live →Binaural Beats Lab
A browser tone generator with frequency presets for focus, rest and sleep. Headphone-friendly, with nothing to install.
Mode 7
A teletext-inspired interactive-fiction engine: character-cell aesthetics, an atmospheric tone and branching narrative.
Audiodrome
Encode a picture into sound, then read it back as a spectrogram. Paint with frequency; listen to the image.
Unity SaveEditor
Adjust values in the visual editor, or work directly in the raw JSON view. Types and schema are kept intact for a clean round-trip.
Identity Generator
Generate fictional identity records for testing, seed data, QA and demos — with a JSON and CSV API.
Mahjong · 麻雀
Mahjong solitaire in the browser — match free pairs to clear the layout. Installable, offline-ready, and quietly styled. No clock to chase.
Shikaku · 四角に切れ
A quiet Japanese logic puzzle — divide the grid into rectangles, each holding one number equal to its area. Generator, solver and three sizes.
Number Sums · 和算
Circle the numbers that add up to each row, column and region total. Every board is solvable by reasoning alone — boards from 3×3 to 10×10, and it plays offline.
Nonograms · 絵
Fill the grid from the run lengths on each row and column, and a picture appears. Nothing to install, and it plays offline.
Slitherlink · 輪
Draw one closed loop so that every number matches the edges around it. One of the quieter Japanese logic puzzles, and it plays offline.
Sudoku
Build boards by hand, generate puzzles, check solutions, or let the solver work through them. Constraint propagation and backtracking under the hood.
Wordle
Six attempts. One word, drawn at random from a British English dictionary. Take your time — there is no clock.
Disgruntled Pigeons
The seagulls took the chips. Fifty-four levels of seaside physics revenge — every sprite drawn in code, every sound synthesised, nothing to download. Plays offline.
Extreme Snail Racing
One mollusc, zero mercy. A full-screen neon arcade racer round the Hellshell Circuit — nitro, near-miss combos, shell armour and a synthwave soundtrack that builds with the race.
Scratch Fever
Instant-win scratchcards with a running balance, four card types and published prize odds. Play money only, and it plays offline.
Tools I wanted close to the work, so I built them into the editor. All published under AndyDixon on the Visual Studio Marketplace.
Cipher Workbench
An in-editor cryptanalysis desk — encode, decode, analyse and crack classical ciphers. Built for CTFs, puzzles and "what is this string?" moments.
Read more →Leviathan Forensics
Byte-level investigation inside VS Code: hex, entropy, strings, carving, structure, disassembly and case exports — for analysts and CTF players.
Read more →Database Navigator
A database cockpit in the editor — browse, query and explore SQL and NoSQL stores across MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Elasticsearch and more.
Read more →Nexus Connect
Terminal connection profiles, gathered into a focused side bar. Open local and remote sessions and browse files over SFTP, all from the editor.
Read more →Permuteatron
Sublime Text-style line moves for VS Code: reverse, shuffle and dedupe lines, and split selections into per-line cursors for fast multi-cursor editing.
Read more →Cisco CircuIT Chat
A tidy AI chat companion in the sidebar — keep multiple conversations beside your editor and reason through code without breaking flow.
Read more →Work that ships inspectable and reusable. Software hidden in a private repository has limited value. Many projects, but a few listed here.
lookingglass-rs
A Looking Glass server in Rust. Spawns shell or login sessions from command-line arguments — handy for custom remote-access setups.
GitHub →honeybadger
A Go tool that floods phishing forms with plausible decoy data, diluting real submissions and frustrating the attacker.
GitHub →neoCMS
A database-free CMS for static sites. Adds visual editing to existing HTML — no database, framework or migration.
GitHub →mode7
A browser interactive-fiction engine with teletext aesthetics, CRT effects, typewriter animation and branching narrative.
GitHub →When the brief is awkward, that is usually where I am most useful.
Available for remote and async work across security-sensitive builds, specialist tools, analytics and observability systems, product development, and projects where the specification is still being written.
UK-based · Remote-friendly
Security-sensitive builds · Specialist tooling · Product development