I’m Jonathan Mitchell, a software engineer with over 20 years of hands-on experience, an engineering leader for more than a decade, and a CTO at multiple companies since 2019. I’m the founder of We Are Born Creative, where I design and build complex SaaS platforms, cloud architecture, and AI-powered systems for clients ranging from ambitious startups to established brands.
This blog has been running since 2007. What started as a place to jot down technical notes has grown into a publication that reaches around 20,000 unique visitors a month. It covers everything from practical Mac and Apple tips to deep dives on developer tooling, Git workflows, Raspberry Pi projects, and – increasingly – the real-world application of AI in software development.
Qualifications & Professional Standing
I’m a Chartered IT Professional (CITP) – a designation awarded by the British Computer Society (BCS) that recognises sustained professional competence, ethical practice, and leadership in the field of IT. It’s the IT industry’s equivalent of chartership in engineering or law, and it’s something I’m genuinely proud to hold. I’m also a full professional member of the BCS (MBCS).
Academically, I hold an MSc in Advanced Computer Systems Design, completed with Distinction at the University of the West of Scotland, and a BSc in Electronic Engineering from Glasgow Caledonian University. During my postgraduate studies I was awarded the University Court Medal for Excellence – twice, once at PGDip level and again at MSc level. I’m also a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and hold an ILM qualification in Managing People for Growth.
That combination of formal academic grounding, professional chartership, and 20+ years of practical engineering experience shapes how I approach every project – rigorous where it matters, pragmatic where it counts.
Career
Before going independent, I spent over a decade at Adeo Group in Glasgow – first as a Senior PHP Developer, then as Head of Technology. In that time I worked on 500+ client sites across e-commerce, corporate, recruitment, and industrial verticals, and helped build a technical function that supported over £45 million in company sales. I was responsible for the full engineering stack: development teams, DevOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, security practices, third-party integrations, and architecture decisions across the entire product range.
I co-founded and served as CTO of Shadow Detect, a cybersecurity startup focused on distributed team security – building network scanners, event-driven architectures in Laravel, and cloud-native systems on Azure. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with some memorable clients through Born Creative, including Gucci and Rod Stewart’s Wolfie’s Whisky brand.
Over the years my work has picked up a few awards along the way: W3 Awards for Best Food and Drink Website and Best Use of Photography in a Website, two Drum Recommends awards for Web Development and Web Design, and a finalist spot in the Drum e-commerce category.
What I’m Working On Now
Day to day I work across the full stack and into the cloud – building and deploying on Microsoft Azure, including Azure AI Foundry for LLM-powered applications, with fully automated CI/CD pipelines running from commit to production. My core languages are PHP, Python, React, and Next.js, with a background in C and C++ from my electronic engineering days that still comes in handy closer to the metal.
AI is no longer a side interest – it’s central to how I work. I use Claude Code daily as an agentic coding tool, and a lot of what I write about on this blog comes directly from that experience. I’ve written extensively about extending Claude Code with custom skills – from enforcing test-driven development and subagent-driven parallel workflows, to integrating 1,000+ external services without boilerplate and running multiple AI agents across Git worktrees without branch chaos. I’ve also covered how to connect Claude Code to local LLMs via Ollama and LM Studio for teams who want to keep things off the cloud entirely.
This isn’t theoretical content – it’s what I’m actually doing, refined through real projects and shared here because I wish some of it had existed when I was working it out.
The Blog
There are over 1,200 posts in the archive. If you’re a developer, there’s plenty on tooling, workflows, and architecture. If you’re an Apple user, there’s a deep well of practical Mac and iPhone tips. And if you’re interested in where AI and software development are heading, that thread runs through more and more of what I publish.
Browse the categories, use the search, or just start wherever something catches your eye.
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