About Stephen P Cooke
I’m a consultant specialising in systems engineering. Over the years that’s meant designing cockpits and testing unmanned ships. The kind of work where the systems are physical, the failure modes are serious, and the evidence has to hold up. I’ve worked across the full lifecycle, from early architecture and requirements through to running the acceptance trials that prove whether a design holds up outside the spec sheet.
These days I split my time between helping other businesses work through their hard problems and applying the same thinking to my own. Right now that’s an AI obsession that includes learning to build my own AI apps, e-commerce (Amazon reselling now, a 3D printing business before it, still got the printer for prototyping), and building an audience from scratch on LinkedIn and Substack.
Around all of that, I’m raising three kids and maintaining a reputation for starting a new hobby roughly every month. My partner works in mental health, which is probably why my bookshelf is full of self-development books I keep threatening to write my own version of. I never will. I started this site instead — somewhere to log the projects and the actual results.
Why this site exists
Most “side hustle” and “build in public” content is written to sell you something. I wanted somewhere that isn’t: a place I write down what I’m actually doing, what it’s actually returning, and where it’s actually going wrong — the way I’d write an engineering report: plainly, with the numbers attached, and without pretending the failures didn’t happen.
- I only write about tools and businesses I genuinely use and pay for.
- The numbers are real, published, and not retouched after the fact.
- If something didn’t work, I say so. That’s data too.
The threads
The consultant.
Systems engineering, applied to hard, physical problems: cockpits, unmanned ships, the kind of work where you can’t hand-wave the failure modes. Define it, understand where it breaks, test before you trust it. That discipline is the lens for everything else here too.
The operator.
While I help other businesses solve their problems, I’m applying the same lens to my own. An AI obsession that’s turned into building my own apps, e-commerce (Amazon reselling now, a 3D printing business previously), and growing a LinkedIn and Substack audience from nothing. Same rules as the consulting work: measure what comes back, kill what doesn’t earn its keep, no invented numbers.
The dad (and the new-hobby-every-month guy).
Three kids will teach you more about resource constraints and priority conflict than any engineering programme will. The rotating hobbies are less a personality quirk and more evidence I never quite stop testing what fits.
What you’ll find here
- Honest write-ups of the AI tools, AI apps I’m building, and e-commerce experiments I’m actually running
- How I’m growing an audience on LinkedIn and Substack, warts and all
- Occasional dispatches from the consulting side: how I think about risk, evidence, and getting complex systems right
- No fabricated wins, no positions I don’t actually hold