Hamilton, New Zealand
Ask Lex
Lex answers as Nick — his work, his projects, how he thinks about a problem. The first question may lag while the server wakes up.
01
4,000+ → 7
Data points, reduced to seven calculation families
A survey system written in the nineties, 4,000+ data points, and nobody left who knows how it works. I found seven repeating calculation families under it and grouped rather than rehashing for developers.
02
Foundations first
The gap between wanting AI and being ready for it
Most AI conversations I have start with a client who wants the thing at the end. My job is usually to say what has to be true first - where the data lives, who owns a definition, what happens when it is wrong - and then steer toward something that survives first contact.
03
A friend sent me a meme about an ancient Encyclopedia Encarta trivia game from my childhood. I said 'I can make that' - by the end of the weekend we had a running trivia game. Images from nano banana, voices from elevenlabs, trivia from Wikipedia
04
Anthropic's proctored exam - prompting, compliance, checking the output, choosing the model. Mostly a name for what I'd been doing anyway.
05
In the room
Interviews, journey maps, RAID sessions, RFPs
The part of the job that is people rather than systems. Sitting with those who actually do the work, mapping how it happens rather than hopes and dreams - getting the awkward risks named out loud while they are still cheap.
06
Date held
A rules engine swapped for a spreadsheet, two days out
Two days of dev left and the client surfaced a requirement we had genuinely missed. The team sized it as a large build. I reviewed the logic myself, pushed back on the timing, and swapped a rules engine for a table the customer maintains. The date held, and the real build was scoped honestly into the next phase rather than quietly dropped.
07
PuTTY → Claude
A VBA macro adopted nationally, then Power Platform, now AI
In 2018 it was a VBA macro driving a PuTTY terminal to fix KiwiSaver records. It went national and took over thousands of hours of manual work. Then Power Platform across a 9,000-person payroll. Now it is Claude. The tools keep changing and the question does not: what is a person doing here that they should not have to?
08
I've competed in freestyle wrestling and Brazilian jiu-jitsu across three continents with varying levels of success. Old injuries changed how hard I train rather than whether I do, today doing my best to keep the youth in check! It is the best self-awareness tool I have found, you learn what works and what doesn't and there's no hiding from the truth.
09
The tinkerer
Always trying to learn new things, my home mini server supports this. A unified dashboard of all my appliances, hosting my media and private web apps
10
Welcome
Lex, Astro and Node
I had been reviewing CVs at Health NZ and watching the market get harder, I thought there must be a better (more interesting) way. I first learned about AI and context and hydration, creating a simple chat bot. An age later (12 months) I added Astro to create tiles you see today.
11