Twenty-five years of other people's hardest problems.
I'm Gary. For more than twenty-five years I've been handed organisations' most awkward technical problems and made them go away. Lodesa brings that to businesses too small to keep someone like me on staff. I'm a native English speaker in a European timezone; I work from Gloucestershire and my clients are anywhere in the world.
Where it began.
My passion for technology started early. Very early. My first real taste of computing was in the 1980s on an Amstrad CPC 464, and while most kids were working through the pile of games it came with, I was more interested in how they worked. Could I make one? Edit one? Make it better? That was my first brush with programming, and I've never put it down since.
A few years later my father, who worked for a major semiconductor company, brought home a "386" IBM PC. So while most teenagers were out playing football (I did a bit of that too), I spent my early teens writing programs in Visual Basic. Then the internet arrived and changed everything, and I'm old enough as an engineer to have worked before it, right through the boom, and into what it's become. Same story with social media. And now, with AI.
All told, that's the best part of thirty-five years with technology, and more than twenty-five of them being paid to untangle other people's.
A bit of everything, everywhere.
Most of my career has been freelancing, which really means getting dropped into an unfamiliar organisation, working out how it all fits together, fixing what's broken, and leaving it in better shape than I found it, usually within a few weeks. I've done that inside a major UK bank, a global technology company, a multinational manufacturer, local councils, emergency services, NHS trusts, a private hospital group and a central-government research body, plus more small businesses than I can count. Different worlds, same job every time: understand the mess, then sort it. All those years also leave you with a good black book. I know engineers and small specialist firms I'd trust with my own systems, and when a job would honestly sit better in one of their hands, that's what I'll tell you, with an introduction.
The security side.
A good chunk of that has been security work. I've hardened whole server estates to the UK government's NCSC standards, held enhanced clearance to work on sensitive Police systems, and on one central-government project the setup I built scored the highest that organisation had ever seen on an external penetration test. When I say I'll keep your data safe, it isn't a slogan; it's most of what I've done.
Still at the sharp end.
I'm not a consultant who put the tools down ten years ago and started drawing diagrams. My hands are still in it at serious scale: I build the automated pipelines that assemble a major UK bank's Linux estate, and I run the platform that keeps hundreds of their servers patched, secure and consistent. It's the same engineering I bring to Lodesa, kept sharp on systems where a mistake makes the news.
What I'm working on right now.
A lot of my current work is exactly what a growing business needs. I'm connecting the tools that run a company so they finally talk to each other, automating the repetitive marketing and admin that quietly eats people's days, and building AI assistants that take on the routine work and pass anything tricky to a human. Much of it lives in the B2B world: joining up sales, marketing, e-commerce and back-office systems, wiring up lead generation, and using AI and automation to help small teams punch well above their weight. It's live, hands-on work, and it's the same toolkit I'd put to work for you.
What I do for the love of it.
Away from work, over many years and entirely on my own time, I've designed and built a sprawling private Linux platform from the ground up: databases clustered and replicating across multiple sites, a mesh of servers stitched together with encrypted networking, secure web services and websites, high-availability, monitoring, the lot. All of it architected, automated and kept running from the ground up. It's the kind of complete, end-to-end system most engineers only ever see one slice of from inside a big team. Building the whole thing myself, and keeping it alive, is where a lot of my deepest Linux and infrastructure experience genuinely comes from.
These days, AI is what interests me most. It has made me faster, and my work better. Ten years ago, plenty of the things a small business needed I could build, but I often knew they'd take too long, cost too much, or need constant babysitting to keep running. AI has changed that. I can now build things quicker, more securely, and in a way that largely looks after itself, which means I can help a small business grow for a fraction of what the same work used to cost.
That's why I started Lodesa: the gap between what technology can do and what it costs to do it has narrowed dramatically, and for the first time I've got the room to deliver proper solutions that fit a small business's budget.
The bit about money.
I'm a product of my time. Without every step of it, the Amstrad, the 386, the arrival of the internet, all of it, I wouldn't be doing what I do now. I love this stuff, and I want to keep using it, learning it, and putting it to work for businesses like yours. I need to pay the bills like anyone does, but you won't find big-agency day rates here, and you won't be passed from one account manager to the next. I'm reasonably priced, because my real passion is the technology, not the money.
See the results this produces →