Dr Stuart W.

Energy R&D | Production AI | Mathematics

County Clare, Ireland

About

I do the mathematics under the buzzwords, and I was doing it before they were buzzwords. A doctorate spent proving that images hide inside fractals, then three decades turning esoteric theory into systems that actually run. I build the kind of AI that has to survive contact with reality - sensors, consequences, and customers who notice when it's wrong. The demo-friendly kind I leave to people with PowerPoints and more runway than rigour. I've watched every hype cycle arrive dressed as a revolution and leave as a footnote - expert systems, objects, the web, big data, blockchain, and now this. The craft is knowing which abstractions survive the winter, and doing the algebra rather than gesturing at it with a laser pointer. Thirty years in have left me with fundamentals I trust completely and very little patience for ceremony mistaken for progress. Unashamed singularitarian, e/acc by instinct, realist by the scars. The honest version of this AI moment is quieter than the noise around it. Most of the noise is people discovering, loudly, that a language model can hold a conversation. The real work is deterministic orchestration, semantically honest retrieval, and knowing exactly where a model will lie to you so you can build where it can't. If you think a vector database is a knowledge base, we should talk - though not for the reason you'd hope. I write about all of it on Medium, in "The Grand Game of Software Engineering" - part philosophy seminar, part Kafkaesque HR theatre, part Factorio hellscape, and in large part catharsis. The day job, almost incidentally, is principal R&D engineer in energy - originating algorithms for grids, tariffs, disaggregation, and real-time sensor data at frankly absurd scale. It takes a genuinely hard problem on real systems - energy, infrastructure, telecommunications, defence-adjacent, or a lab that builds rather than ships slideware - to turn my head. It always has. If that's you, get in touch. https://fractaldoctor.medium.com · https://x.com/FractalDoctor

Experience

  • Singularitarian Writer at The Grand Game Of Software Engineering
    Jun 2020 - Present · 6 yrs 2 mos

    Sardonic essays on the Grand Game of Software Engineering and adjacent terrain. Interviews, management theatre, the recruitment grift, AI hype, the simulation hypothesis, and the existential angst of the technologically progressive. Written from inside, for fellow types, against the droids. Six years on Medium and counting, full catalogue in Publications.

  • Principal R&D Engineer at Full Stack Energy
    Nov 2015 - Present · 10 yrs 9 mos

    A division of ResourceKraft pursuing "Technology Development for the Energy Sector". I research, design, and deploy algorithmic solutions across energy and related industries, including a patent in energy disaggregation plus production work in EV charge control, grid, tariff and supply optimisation, anomaly detection, combinatorics, constraint satisfaction, linear programming, and LLM systems. Applications include automated decision-making systems, report generation, chatbots that aren't useless, trend analysis, and monitoring of frankly absurd amounts of real-time sensor data. I originate algorithms and glue things together while pushing for better processes and proper documentation. I've also endured the bureaucratic circus of grant writing (SEAI, EU H2020, et al.). It left scars, but at least I know what not to do. I do a lot of mathematical modelling, prediction analysis, data warehousing, dashboarding (it's a word), and alerting which tends to be very popular. Tools I use include Mathematica, InfluxDB, Telegraf, Grafana, along with Swift, C, SQL, AWS (insert acronym salad here), and the occasional battle with Docker. And, sadly, Kubernetes. Specifically on the "AI" side, I use local and remote LLMs with tool-based function calling (not always with Python, because 'reasons') to interact with APIs, queues, and vector or graph databases. If you're using vector databases just for RAG, then you need to stop and think harder. Automation around the OpenAI (style) API, bespoke model generation, and training via algorithmic analysis all feature heavily. Short version. I merge industrial practice with academic rigour to produce solutions that are elegant, practical, and occasionally downright clever. If you're shuffling data around and wondering what to do with it, I can probably help, and even give you an actually authentic reason to put "AI" on your slide deck too.

  • Independent iOS Developer at Freelance
    May 2009 - Present · 17 yrs 3 mos

    Design, develop and market my own iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and (of course) macOS apps. At one point I had over 250 apps on the iOS App Stores (iOS/macOS/tvOS), but let it fall off as I had other things to do. As of 2026 I've begun to address this, removing the old and outdated ones, updating some, but putting new ones onto the store from my own niche interest. Apple is, without doubt, the best ecosystem to develop in and for and I'm always happy to hear about iOS or macOS roles.

  • Contract iOS Developer at Localmint.com
    Oct 2015 - Nov 2015 · 2 mos

    iOS development in Swift. Extensive interaction with RESTful systems, UIKit standard stuff, custom transitions, TestFlight.

  • Contract iOS Developer (2 renewals) at Marino
    Mar 2014 - Sep 2014 · 7 mos

    Apps for the business and educational markets Objective-C, Shell scripting Video streaming and caching, SQLite and FMDB, CoreGraphics, Custom Segues, Animation, ...