--- name: Nic Alpi role: CTO at Amba · development and product also: board advisor to software agencies before: built and sold a Rails consultancy (2011 → 2021) based: Bristol, UK · French, here since 2008 writes: field notes on leading teams and AI without losing ownership contact: [email protected] ---

# A bit more about me…

I started CookiesHQ, a Rails consultancy, in 2011 and grew it to 20 people and over £1 million in revenue. Amba bought it in 2021, and since then I've been CTO there, leading the development and product team: eight developers building software for elderly care. Outside Amba I'm a board advisor to software agencies. I've been writing software for 30 years, 15 of them as a CTO.

The best CTOs I've met aren't the busiest ones. They've designed systems, teams and lives that don't depend on heroics, so a bad week stays a bad week. That is the standard I hold my own team to.

Why field notes

I write here because too much leadership advice performs a certainty the author doesn't have. I stopped publishing for three years after the sale; the post about that is the most personal thing on this site, and burnout turned out to be information about the system I was in, not about me. I started again in January 2026, and what comes out now are field notes: what I tried with my own team, and what happened. They cover leading teams, using AI without losing ownership of what gets built, and getting useful work done without adding another system to your day. Most of them come back to the same thing: AI made output cheap, and good judgement is now the advantage.

If you want to know whether they're worth your time, start with the one on measuring AI by speed and check it against what you're seeing in your own team.

Working with me

If you run a software company or an agency and want that kind of thinking inside your own team, there are two shapes this takes. Fractional CTO is one or two days a week, and availability for that is limited. Advisory is a monthly call plus async access in between, and that's open now. I've taken a team through the AI shift once already, in public — you borrow that.

If that sounds like where you are, the next step is a short email to [email protected].