Be patient and persevere.

I'm Mark Richards — a software engineer who likes getting in amongst the nuts and bolts. Rails and DOOH platform work, AI tooling experiments, and a stubborn habit of finishing things.

The Gr8tful Dev story

A little background on how this corner of the internet came to be.

There's not much to tell, definitely some technical sophistication — which includes both "hard skills" like coding, command lines, and version control, and "soft skills" like guessing keyboard shortcuts, Googling error messages, and knowing when to just reboot. I'm a programmer by trade — committed, persistent, and optimistic — and I'd rather ship something that works than polish a pitch deck.

If you're looking for a coder who likes to get the job done and isn't afraid to get in amongst the nuts and bolts, say hello.

The Gr8tful Dev appeared one evening when a domain provider had a sale and the .dev TLD was available. So knowing that a presence was required and some fun could be had, the Gr8tful Dev was born. The trading side of things lives over at TR Solutions — and the blog below is where I write about the nuts and bolts, the dead ends, and the wins.

Projects

Companies get a mention, but it's really about the technologies and how the solutions worked.

Earth Wave

A Rails 8 shop built to learn the stack properly — product options with compound cart keys, per-option line items, and checkout that stays out of the way.

Rails 8 · e-commerce

Doohly (Workplace Media)

Client work for Workplace Media — an RSS feed manager with a public API (PixelPimp), a proof of concept pulling the SBS news feed, and content packages that keep digital out-of-home screens fed and on schedule.

DOOH · RSS · API

JAC Media

Weather and news packages for JAC Media's DOOH network — modular builds keyed to screen formats, so the same pipeline plugs into different hardware and layouts.

DOOH · weather & news

TR Solutions

The trading side of things — a small Astro landing page on Cloudflare Workers for sole trader work and consultancy referrals.

Astro · Cloudflare

Surface Oracle

A Rails 8 exploration project — news discovery and feed pipelines used to bootstrap new work fast, and to keep my hand in the whole stack.

Rails 8 · research

Model ops lab

Running local LLMs (Gemma, Qwen, IQuest) on my own hardware and benchmarking them for Rails dev-agent work — with a RAG layer in the loop. Slower than the cloud, a lot more interesting.

Local LLMs · RAG

Elsewhere

A few other corners of the internet I have a hand in.

Duncan Claw

AI engineer, product builder, pragmatic sidekick — the assistant that helps me ship the things on this site.

duncanclaw.ai →

BASE13

AI operating systems for organisations — the kind of work that keeps the DOOH and platform side busy.

base13.ai →

Latest from the blog

Occasional writing, when the mood and the time align.

  • Trying to make a local LLM do Rails work

    September 08, 2026

    I spent the last while trying to answer a simple question: can a model running on my own hardware do real Rails dev-agent work, if I hand it the right documentation?

  • Sinclair Spectrum

    December 28, 2020

    The year was 1985, the computer was a Sinclair Spectrum 48k.

All posts →