Training: an adaptive coach on phone and watch
Android · Wear OS · Bluetooth · Health Connect · intervals.icu
A training app that turns a goal (a 5K, a sportive, staying healthy, losing weight, easing back after an injury) into a plan, and adapts that plan to what actually happened.
- Plan generator: sessions built from the goal and the person’s limits, with health conditions such as heart medication, pregnancy and joint problems changing the plan safely. It’s verified against a hand-built coaching plan, session for session.
- Device control: steers a Wahoo KICKR (ERG power, matched to a crank power meter) and WalkingPad or FTMS treadmills, recording the session itself.
- Coaching on the wrist: a Wear OS watch app mirrors the session and sends its own heart rate.
- Suggestions, not surprises: missed sessions, FTP changes and jog speeds are offered as yes-or-no questions.
- Privacy by design: no accounts and no tracking. Training data lives in the user’s own intervals.icu account, and private data stays encrypted on the phone.
Smart irrigation over long-range radio
Custom PCBs · ESP32 · LoRa · Home Assistant · Node-RED
A garden irrigation network that runs on batteries for months.
- Hardware: custom-designed boards with solar charging, fuel gauging and latching valve drivers.
- Radio: encrypted two-way LoRa with replay protection, so commands reach sensors even while they sleep.
- Automation: dawn watering flows in Node-RED, with alerts in Home Assistant.
- Measured, not assumed: brown-out, timing and range problems were each found on the bench and fixed at the root.
A self-healing Kubernetes platform
k3s · Argo CD · GitOps · VictoriaMetrics · chaos engineering
A multi-node, highly available home-lab production cluster running dozens of services (databases, identity, home automation, AI).
- GitOps end to end: every change goes through Git and Argo CD; secrets come from OpenBao.
- Automated remediation: playbooks investigate and fix common failures before a human is paged.
- Proven resilience: scheduled chaos experiments, and documented recovery from real hardware failures.
Selected enterprise outcomes
From Dr John Pikoulas’s work in banking, fintech, retail and the public sector:
- National retail: a real-time data platform processing 50 million transactions a day at 99.9% reliability, giving same-day visibility of trading. Query times went from 45 seconds to under 3.
- FCA-regulated fintech: an event-driven platform on Kafka with governed data contracts, giving 30% better processing efficiency and 25% higher team productivity.
- Tier 1 bank: a SQL Server to Snowflake migration with phased cutover and parallel-run validation.
- Lakehouse delivery: governed, repeatable platform delivery, with environment provisioning cut from 2 days to 15 minutes.
- Public sector: platform modernisation for a national service, with 35% faster deployments and 40% more efficient testing.