Who I am
I’m Stephen Cooke, 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.
These days I split my time between helping other businesses work through their hard problems, and trying to build my own. Right now that means an obsession with AI, and dabbling in e-commerce to see what actually works when I’m the one carrying the risk instead of just advising on it.
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.
That means:
- 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. That discipline — define it, understand where it breaks, test before you trust it — is the lens for everything else here too.
The operator.
While I help other businesses solve their problems, I’m trying to build my own — currently an obsession with AI and a dabble in e-commerce. 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.
The logger.
This site is where the projects and the actual results get written down — the professional version of me lives on LinkedIn; this is the honest ledger behind it.
What you’ll find here
- Honest write-ups of the AI tools and e-commerce experiments I’m actually running
- A running account of what the side projects are earning — and where they’re not
- 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